On Mon, 2010-08-16 at 14:18 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote: > I think this is worth further discussion. If the number is towards the > 48-63 days level and that's what window people are actually doing > development that may be a problem because it is an extremely short time > period. > > It's also interesting that with all the freezes, deadlines, etc we have > firm explicit set dates. While active development is implicit. it might > be worth it to set active deployment as an explicit time period just as > another reminder to everyone about when major changes are going on vs when > they aren't. As I mentioned briefly on IRC, I think the problem is that we're kinda stuck between two models: we're trying to move to a model where development starts when N-1 branches and finishes when N Alpha hits freeze, and from then on, there's only bugfixes to N. But I think to an extent we've partially achieved the stricter freezes which restrict development to 'until Alpha freeze', but we haven't really successfully moved all our processes and conventions so that people start development for N+1 while N is still going on. Just look at the queue of updates to go into F14 after the Alpha releases, for instance; lots of that stuff is stuff that shouldn't strictly happen under the ideal of the current model. So practically speaking, most teams are starting major development from 'N-1 release' - probably minus a week for the post-release lull when everyone takes a breather. It's very unlikely that everything can actually get done between then and Alpha freeze, so stuff is running over. We even schedule it, in some cases - GNOME 2.32 clearly isn't close to done and is still going through API changes (though that's partly complicated by going to GTK+ 3 and back again). systemd is still very early. The Python 2.7 migration isn't really complete yet. These are just examples, and I'm not suggesting anyone involved with those projects is doing anything 'wrong', just observing how things are actually currently happening. For instance, right now, according to the Ideal Plan, everyone should have started on their Big Plans for F15 in Rawhide and should be committing the really big changes from now forward. Is anyone actually at that point? If not, then we're just going to go through the same cycle for F15-F16 because people will start their work for F15 after F14 is done, realize there isn't enough time to get it done before Alpha freeze, keep working on it through Alpha freeze and Beta even, and not have time to start their big changes for F16 before F15 is nearly done...and so on ad infinitum. It may be a bit of a tough cycle to break. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
