On Tue, Dec 20, 2016, at 05:20 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 04:48:44PM +0100, Pavel Raiskup wrote:
> I probably lost the context ... what real-world problems are trying to fix?
> Everything which comes to my mind should be solved by better tooling for
> updates-testing testers.
I've given this in several ways across the thread, but I don't mind
restating. :)
1. I believe in the value of releases, for the project and for end
users — as opposed to a "rolling release" system. But major releases
are a lot of work across the project — not just release engineering,
but marketing, ambassadors, design, docs, and others. One possible
way to reduce this is to have major releases less frequently. I want
a cadence that gives us the highest return on effort. Maybe that's
six months — and maybe it isn't.
If we prepare to do more "significant" updates during the release cycle
we are going to need to do some of this streamlining regardless. It
sounds like this is worthy of exploring solely as a need to grow area.
2. I really want releases to come at a known time every year, +/-
two
weeks. Keeping to this with six month targets means that if (when!)
we slip, the next release may only have five or four months to bake.
This doesn't seem like it's the ideal for the above — maybe we can
get the engineering processes streamlined enough to make it
comfortable, but there's still the matter of marketing and the rest.
We build Fedora for a lot of reasons, and I think this one is as
important as the others. I believe that we will find an easier time
creating energy around our releases if they are more known in time. I
am not sure they have to be once per year on a fixed calendar, but they
need to represent the culmination of work to introduce significant
features. I actually would prefer to see a feature-gated release option
as opposed to only thinking in terms of time-gates. I think having
something to say is more important than knowing when you're going to
speak.
3. The modularity initiative will mean that different big chunks of
what we use to compose the OS can update at different speeds and
have different lifecycles. That gives us a lot more flexibility in
the above, and I'd like us to start thinking about what we *want*
to.
Building on this, major module releases might be the feature-gate
trigger we need to do a new "release" while incremental improvement gets
pushed out as a .X release.
I suggested one release a year as an alternative to the current two
per
year. I guess three per year would be possible (but seems counter to
the above); other plans like eight- or nine-month cycles don't have the
fixed-calendar property I'm looking for (and I'm pretty sure no one
wants to go to one every two years).
The proposals previously in this thread are ideas aimed at presenting
users with an annual release from a marketing/ambassadors/design, etc.,
point of view, but also addressing our upstream stakeholders' desire to
have Fedora ship their software fast. (For example, GNOME.) I hoped we
could find ways to make them also reduce release effort for developers,
packagers, releng, and QA, but from the feedback so far people don't
really feel like those particular suggestions do.
Another possibility would be to simply keep releases as normal but go
revist the "tick-tock" cadence we talked about a while ago: that is, a
May/June release aimed at features, and faster Oct/Nov release where we
concentrate on infrastructure — and then call that second release each
year the ".1".
Tick-tock makes me worried that people will begin to assume the Tick
isn't worthwhile and they should wait on Tock.
And yet another possibility is that we keep things as they are. If
that's the overall consensus, okay. :)
Now you're talking crazy :P j/k!
regards,
bex