"Tick-tock" release cadence?

[Adam Jackson]

On Thu, 2014-12-04 at 09:39 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:

> For us, that would mean alternating between concentrating on release
> features and on release engineering and QA process and tooling. During
> the "tick", we'd focus on new features and minimize unrelated rel-eng
> change. During the "tock", we'd focus on the tools, and minimize change
> that might affect that.

I mean, that's fine for rel-eng or qa, but I'm not sure it makes sense
for devel.  If that's a cadence we need for developing the tooling by
which we build Fedora that's one thing, but I don't think it nececcarily
implies a lot about the cadence of the components _in_ a Fedora release.

Clearly there's some overlap.  Anaconda is probably the most sensitive
component to Fedora changing underneath it, since the install
environment is _also_ an instance of the Fedora being installed.  But
lorax and pungi, not so much.  If we need to space out some Fedora
changes in order to get meta-Fedora changes staged, we should address
those case-by-case, which would mean having much more of an explicit
plan for those tools than (afaik) we currently do.  Let's start by
building that plan first, then worry about scheduling.

> There has also been some previous talk of a "polish" release, where we
> focus exclusively on bug-fixes big and small, and delay big features,
> including holding GNOME and other showcase software to the same
> version. That's a possibility still, but it would require significant
> collaborator consensus to really make work, and I don't think we have
> that. (We still have "first" as a foundation, after all.)
> 
> So the tock release _wouldn't_ be that.

I think it's a bit misguided to even think of these things as related.
"Polish" in an end-user-visible sense is itself a list of tasks and
criteria that require dedicated attention, preferably from someone with
the breadth of experience and lack of fear to be able to dive into
whatever needs fixing.  It's not a coat of paint you let cure for six
months, it's a process.

- ajax