Patrick Barnes wrote:
To start off, congratulations are in order for everyone who was involved in
bringing Fedora Core 5 to fruition. Fedora Core 5 is the most outstanding
Fedora Core release to date, and we've seen a lot of progress since Fedora
Core 4. Thank you and congratulations to everyone!
Overall, I think the Fedora Core 5 release was a great success. We had a few
minor glitches, as will always happen on release day, but things really came
together to deliver this awesome release in an awesome way.
While the excitement is still strong, let's look back over the events leading
up to and immediately following the release, and see what we can do to make
things better both for the lifetime of this release and for future releases.
Over the weekend, we saw quite a few leaked ISOs flying around. This is to be
expected, but we need to try to minimize this to avoid potential problems.
We also saw a large number of users take advantage of BitTorrent, which
greatly reduced demand on the main servers, but, as always, people are always
looking for more bandwidth.
Documentation on downloads, checking ISO images and using Bittorrent
should be better. The fact that we can do a minimal installation with a
single CD, a desktop class installation in 2 CD's or a network
installation with boot.iso image is far from clear to everyone involved.
It has been offered for years and people continue to request it as a new
feature not being aware that it exists already in just about every
release. Kickstart should be much better advertised.
We've got plans in the works that will help, but
there's always room for more improvement. It is great that there is so much
interest, so how can we best support that interest without failing our
release goals?
A lot of switches and buttons had to be operated manually for this release.
We could almost certainly add automation and scheduling, and we could
streamline processes to make life easier on ourselves.
The build system needs to be exploited to provide more information. The
bugs closed and new features implemented between every release
including the test releases with bugzilla references. Refer to
http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/ for what I have in mind. The
documentation specified in the RPM specs on every package should be
available in the documentation page in revisions. This will make it
easier to point to a particular man page or refer to it.
We had to update a lot of information on both fedora.redhat.com and
fedoraproject.org. We have some unnecessary duplication, and there are
places where we can get things working a little more smoothly. Jesse, and
anyone else working on these things, what did you notice? How can we improve
the process?
High time we got rid of fedora.redhat.com and launch fedoraproject.org
with a new design.
It took a fair chunk of the day to get the latest release notes up on the
website and working properly.
The release announcement should have had a link to the known issues page
- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/FC5Common and publishing the
release notes has always been in the last minute. We should do this
earlier when we start pushing ISO images to the mirror. The release
process and tasks being done should be publicly documentation to make
the information more transparent and possibly delegate tasks within the
community as much as possible. Other development processes such as
release targets, blockers and other tasks within the development process
of Fedora should be available to everyone interested.
Surely, we can automate some of this. I know
a lot of work is going into getting the build tools working better, but what
else can we do to simplify this for a prompt release reaction?
There were a few other technical errors or delays, such as those that prompted
symlinking torrent URLs and the update to the release announcement, the lack
of the planned instructions for CD-burning in the distribution directories,
and a few known flaws in the final release. These kinds of things are bound
to happen, especially when internal issues arise just before the release, but
that's no reason to ignore them. What did we miss, and how can we make sure
we get it right next time?
Finally, there has been a lot of buzz leading up to and following the release.
We saw a refreshing surge even before the release hit. That's great, but the
buzz could still be bigger. We saw a few reviews of the test releases, and
many sites have published new information in the last 24 hours, but how can
we generate more of this? Did anybody notice particular areas that were
undersold?
I should have done the tour better -
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tours/FedoraCore5. Next time we should do
this starting from the first test releases. Hopefully we get more
testers and feedback that way too. The front page of fedora.redhat.com
was too boring and pretty much no changes while we should have been
shouting about the new release from the roof top.
Now is the time for radical thoughts and ideas that can shape what we do to
support Fedora Core 5 and prepare for Fedora Core 6. Let's hear them!
Thats pretty much it for now. We have a roadmap page at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RoadMap.
--
Rahul
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