Re: Future releases of Debian
Hi!
Am 2003-07-23 11:25 -0400 schrieb Matt Zimmerman:
> I'm not convinced that establishing release goals will and deadlines speed
> the release process. For example, a prominent release goal for sarge will
> be debian-installer, since we cannot release without it. Will telling the
> d-i developers "you must be finished by <arbitrary date>" bring it to
> completion faster?
According to my personal experiences in both SW developing and
real-world projects: definively yes! If there are neither goals nor
deadlines at all, people tend to add bells and whistles, without
getting anything completely done (i. e. releasable). In addition,
deadlines IMHO _may_ improve motivation (as long as they are not
ridiculously short), but getting a new release ready should be an
important goal to every Developer. Goals are very important to keep
people motivated.
That should not mean that missing the deadline by a few weeks is
disastrous; other OSS and also commercial projects also suffer from
this - "planning means replacing coincidences by mistakes".
Besides, what's so bad with the current boot-floppies that they could
not be used for another release? Most people will do a mere
dist-upgrade anyway, and b-f are thoroughly tested. But this certainly
is another issue...
Just my $0.02,
Martin
--
Martin Pitt
home: www.piware.de
eMail: martin@piware.de
Es gibt zwei Regeln für Erfolg im Leben:
1. Erzähle den Leuten nie alles, was Du weißt.
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