Re: Release management
On Jul 04, A. P. Harris wrote:
> Regarding shortening the release cycle, one way to shorten the time
> to freeze would be to threaten to freeze early and often (so people get
> new packages in and don't wait for the last minute).
I dunno about threaten; how about enforcing freezes early and often.
I think a reasonable procedure is to set a "no new packages" freeze
date 3/4 months after the stable release. Then the project leader (or
release manager) can set a "bugfixes only" freeze date not more than 1
month later. Assuming a worst-case scenario of a 1-2 month
bugfix-only freeze, this still gives us 2 releases/year. If we
maintain high quality packages, we could reach perhaps 2.5 or 3
releases/year.
I suspect some of our problems with boot-floppies work revolve around
the fact we need to concentrate minds on releases to get that work
done (after all, building potato boot floppies is worthless to most
people if potato isn't going to be released anytime soon).
I also think we need to ban package forks during freeze; the last big
X reorganization shows the dangers of trying to reorganize a package
during freezes, particularly for porters. This perl thing could turn
similarly ugly, even without a freeze going on [already, many non-i386
arches can't be installed because the new perl-base is a "binary-all"
package that replaces binary-arch packages that haven't been
recompiled yet]. Things eventually worked out in the end with X,
thanks to a lot of hard work by Branden and the various porters, but
we should be darn careful about doing this in the future.
Anyway, we need a freeze date ASAP. I propose September 1 (about 8.5
weeks from today), with a release date to be determined later. A
release manager would be nice too... but I suspect we can live without
one before the freeze date.
Chris
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