Re: XFree86 4.3.0 and testing (was: when will the release release)
On Fri, 2 Apr 2004, Daniel Stone wrote:
> I'm in a hurry this morning, so I can't give a substantive response for
> a couple of hours,
Ok I am looking forward to a full response.
> but I'll just say that I have no confidence in the XSF as a team. Not to
> do with you, or Michel, or anything, but I have no confidence that it is
> a team in the true collaborative sense, or that it will ever be managed
> as such with the current leadership. Again, not a slight to you, Michel,
> or anyone else helping out with X.
While you are at it, would you mind also to explain to the community which
are your reasons to candidate as XSF Release Manager while you do not have
confidence in the XSF as a team?
Here are my motivations to "candidate":
Recent changes in my Debian activities will soon give me the time and the
possibility to take over some bigger tasks than one I am handling now.
As you all know I am part of the apache team and my main focus is on
apache1.3. Sarge will have apache2 as default web server (task: webserver)
and apache1.3 will be soon in a "release for sarge state" and probably, as
obvious next step, obsoleted any time after sarge.
The combinantion of the 2 will free quite a lot of time in my Debian life.
Due to the fact that I have learned a lot from my own mistakes in handling
apache (fixes to these mistakes will be on the way as soon as i will
complete my movement to the new house - simply because i can't handle a
full discussion in my actual net/resources conditions), plus the
experience I have built with cooperative maintaince and that I need to be
challenged to keep myself "alive", I would love to spend more energy
within the XSF. Project and team that i had to place in low priority until
now, mainly due to time restrictions.
Taking over some responsabilities/tasks from Branden will give him the
possibility to reallocate this time to other activities.
The short term plan, and i doubt anyone will object to this, is to have X
in a release state for sarge. We need to focus our energy towards bug
fixing but we need to be extremely carefull with the release cycle. X is
not a package we can upload on a daily base. I think the right balance at
this point in time is a bi-weekly release or 10 bug fixes, which one comes
first, with the flexibility to decide to delay one upload when bug fixes
must flow into sarge asap or speeding up via urgency field. It is explicit
that no major changes should go in until they are absolutely necessary and
never prior discussion on the mailing list.
We will work together on a long term plan after sarge. There is no real
need for it right now imho.
BTS is full of things to do... no doubts about it. There are almost 900
bugs. a bit more than 500 marked as upstream. As a Release Manager i would
like to see one person working only on packaging issues, while at least 2
persons taking care of the upstream ones (or at least a similar ratio).
Of course XSF should find the best delegates for these tasks and any
volunteer or sporadic help will be appreciated.
Testing the bug fixes. This is extremely important at this point in time.
Do not commit bug fixes without testing them. We are not in the position
to ruin uploads with FTBFS. Always try to test on as many archs as you
can. Of course there might be exceptions such as hardware restrictions
(eg: i can't test this or that because i do not have that specific version
of that card) but it must not be the normal case. You can still test that
it does not break anything already working. I highly recommends to add
information about the tests you have done to verify the bug fix whenever
you can, especially when you cannot test directly on a specific setup. Eg.
applied patch to fix ATI driver Y,Z but since we can't test on that
specific hardware it has been verified that it doesn't break with other
ATI cards.
and so on.. common sense applies here in how you report and track these
information.
My position will be to coordinate the people working on bug fixes and
monitor their activities to ensure to stick with the plan and coordinate
with debian-release management in order to allign XSF activities with
Debian ones.
Thanks
Fabio
PS: just a reminder. I will be offline for a couple of days at least
(moving more stuff to the new house) as i already wrote and people should
be aware of it by now :-) please be nice if i won't answer back in a
millisecond.
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