Suggested Freeze Policy change for Fedora 22+

[Stephen Gallagher]

On Sun, 2014-11-23 at 10:02 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> > These new rules don't ban "preventing a slip", they attempt to eliminate
> > the unreasonable demands we're putting on our volunteer QA team *every
> > week during Freeze*. It's gotten out of hand and it's burning people
> > out.
> > 
> > The primary problem is that when we slip, there has never been a clear
> > statement made about when exactly when the deadline is for devs to get
> > their fixes in. Historically, devs have been operating under the
> > assumption that as long as a package lands before the next Go/No-Go
> > meeting, but that has failed to account for the time needed to create a
> > new Test Compose (which takes approx. 8 hours right now) as well as time
> > to have the QA team re-run the Release Validation tests (which takes an
> > absolute minimum of 20 hours fueled by caffeine and adrenaline). This
> > constant pause-then-panic situation is untenable and needs to be
> > addressed.
> > 
> > By instituting the above plan, we will be much more transparent about
> > what the deadlines are for all participants (dev/maintainers, rel-eng
> > and QA) and we relieve the latter two of some of their panicked efforts
> > if we get to the Monday Blocker Review and it's clear that there is no
> > realistic chance that the Thursday Go/No-Go will rule in favor.
> 
> I think our fundamental disagreement is that you believe that the rules will 
> make developers come up with fixes faster, whereas I believe that we 
> developers are already fixing things as fast as we can and the rules will 
> only make Fedora releases slip more often.

Yeah, that's a valid concern and one I'm not ignoring. I'm just
concerned that (going by F21 Alpha and Beta) the "hero testing" doesn't
result in avoiding a slip most of the time. In the case of Alpha, that
was going on for a month before we finally were able to release. That's
not fair to QA and it *certainly* doesn't make it seem like something
new contributors would want to put themselves through.
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