Re: squeeze release cycle?

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>]

On Mon, Nov 09 2009, Raphael Hertzog wrote:

> On Mon, 09 Nov 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> So, there was a long discussion here after Debconf about the merits or
>> lack thereof of a freeze date at the end of this year for a squeeze
>> release early next year.  My general feeling of the discussion was that
>> there was a fair bit of opposition to freezing and releasing so quickly
>> after lenny, but since that's also my personal opinion, I may be
>> misreading the discussion.  Either way, where I think we left that
>> discussion was with a statement that no decision had been made and the
>> release team and others were going to think about this and provide more
>> information later.
>
> Indeed, we lack a clear vision again. madduck's email on -release have
> also been unanswered:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2009/10/msg00239.html
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2009/11/msg00022.html
>
> Luk proposed a new freeze date of march 2010:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/10/msg00002.html
>
> But indeed it's only a proposal at this point. The release team needs
> to set a date in stone now.

        Back in the bad old days, we paid a lot of attention to one
 aspect of the release attributes: Quality, as measured by "release
 critical" bugs.  That  gave to nice aphorisms like "release when
 ready", but did not really cater to timeliness of the releases.

        We should take care not to let the pendulum swing too far the
 other way: Where timeliness trumps the quality. We also have release
 goals; which implies that the release team likely to be looking at
 other things than just dates:
  A) Is the current testing release close to being release quality?  It
     does not need to be perfect, but freezing with a large number of
     release critical bugs either makes for a long freeze, or a
     reduction in quality of implementation as we ignore otherwise RC
     bugs.  I recall freeze/release times being linked to RC bug
     thresholds, and while I am not advocating a tight coupling, a total
     de-coupling does not seem advisable either.
  B) Are the current release goals on track to being met? Would a little
     bit of slack time help, as long as it is not too much?

        manoj
-- 
QOTD: Some people have one of those days.  I've had one of those lives.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B  924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C