Anaconda is totally trashing the F18 schedule (was Re: f18: how to install into a LVM partitions (or RAID))

[Panu Matilainen]

On 11/05/2012 09:39 AM, drago01 wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 5:57 AM, Dennis Gilmore <dennis at ausil.us> wrote:
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> El Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:59:54 -0700
>> Jesse Keating <jkeating at j2solutions.net> escribió:
>>> On 10/31/2012 09:56 AM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>>>> * Jesse Keating, Jeremy Katz, and others who helped shape the
>>>> current policy and theory of our release schedule felt that the 6
>>>> month release cycle was fine but that certain features were going
>>>> to take longer to develop. Those would need to be developed and not
>>>> enter into Fedora until they were close enough that they could be
>>>> completed during that cycle.
>>>>     - No matter what we do to try and increase the development cycle
>>>> within a release, there's always going to be issues that take
>>>> longer than the release that we need to deal with.  Perhaps, we
>>>> just need to be better about making people follow this model.
>>>
>>> I'm not entirely sure what I felt then, but I'm certainly open to a
>>> longer release cycle.  In fact I'm very much in favor of one, one
>>> that puts more time between "feature complete" and the actual alpha
>>> release. All too often we see features crash land right at the
>>> deadline, and any software that has to integrate across a lot of
>>> pieces (like anaconda) gets stuck trying to account for all these
>>> changes in a very limited time frame, only to be hindered quickly by
>>> a freeze process.
>>
>> I really do not object to a longer release cycle.  I am also open to
>> making feature freeze being 4-6 weeks before Alpha change freeze. The
>> risk we run is people land new features anyway. but we run that today.
>> We always have a run of things late. People need to land changes
>> earlier  the bigger the change the earlier it needs to land.  Maybe it
>> wont be a popular idea but having feature freeze at previous release
>> time is needed. What I am thinking is:
>>
>> Branch as we do, which opens up development for next release same as
>> we do today, so in the current cycle when we branched off f18, f19
>> features needed to start landing so all that would be taken for f18 is
>> bug fix and integration fixes.  when we release f18 we hit F19 feature
>> freeze.
>
> That does not work because we do not have unlimited resources ... you
> can't expect people to work on F19 features at the same time while
> they are trying to get F18 ready for release.

If/when the "real work" behind a feature has been done early enough, 
getting from Fedora alpha to final consists of just a few bugfixes that 
can only be found with sufficiently large test-audience. That's very 
different from the way things some things land: known very incomplete 
work submitted at very last minute, followed by a mad scramble to try 
and scrape it to somehow acceptable state in time. It's avoidable by 
simply resisting the urge to slip stuff in on the last minute, the 
release cycle is short enough that world does not end if you postpone 
something to the next release.

> Honestly I don't think that the current issues have anything to do
> with the schedule but more with the way we handled the anaconda
> feature. We should just fix that and not try to make random changes
> all over the place.
>
> Basically there should not be any "this cannot be reverted" (there is
> no such thing really) features. If it is evident before the feature
> freeze that a given feature would not be ready in time we have to punt
> it to the next release PERIOD.

No disagreement there - features with no feasible contingency plan 
should be treated very cautiously and if accepted anyway, should have 
stricter completeness-requirements and much earlier deadlines than 
easily reversible things.

	- Panu -