On 11 September 2012 10:36, Stephan Kulow
On 11.09.2012 11:23, Will Stephenson wrote:
Given that 12.2 slipped by 2 months, and the development process for 12.3 is "to be discussed", what schedule are we working on towards 12.3 at the moment?
Every time I've been involved in a project without a schedule, we've had a long period of (probably highly satisfying for developers) of 'undirected hacking' followed by crisis, followed by a rush to 'get it out before people forget who we are' which inevitably had some fallout (I'm thinking of the period leading up to KDE 4.0 here ;).
Hi,
Good idea, let's see what comes out of it - it's actually the first time in my memory where I didn't have to boss the list around to come up with some *reactions* about proposed release schedules.
So I'd like to start the discussion now before we lose a month waiting to discuss it at osc12, where only a fraction of the active members of the project are is going to be present anyway. You don't want everything to be decided by German Engineers* for you do you?
Some ideas to start the ball rolling:
* openSUSE 12.2 original schedule + 8 months = openSUSE 12.2 actual release + 4 months = Do a short cycle and release in March 2013, essentially 12.2 + bugfixes and updates
Aehm, March is 6 months away and that might be a short cycle for openSUSE, it's a business as usual for many other distributions. This would be my choice - especially as factory development already happened during 12.2 release. E.g. we integrated a new kernel, a new texlive, two new KDE versions, ... basically all before 12.2 was out.
OK so what you're saying is we have until the end of September to make our mind up, and look to release in March - effectively a 7month cycle taking into account that Factory has already bumped versions etc? This deviates from what the original plan was for 12.2 - 8 month cycle. One of the advantages that our peers have is predictability, you know what month a Fedora or Ubuntu release will be in and can plan accordingly, if we start shuffling lead times people will get confused and switch off.
* openSUSE 12.2 actual release + 8 months = May 2013, business as usual, using a fixed process to solve the problems that caused the 12.2 slip
And then? This is the biggest question in this concept - Release 13.1 in January 2014? No, thanks. - Release always in may afterwards with tumbleweed included in the process? Possible, but will need more drastic changes and I'm not sure we're there yet
* Extend the release cycle keeping same process and longer stabilization period (effective 12.2 release process; leads to shipping 'outdated' stuff)
12.2 has no outdated stuff, it has tested stuff. I beg to differ. But the stabilization period was not the problem with 12.2, the problem was that the time before that was for many "undirected hacking" and it was up to very few to get it together. A tendency that happens with long schedules I'm afraid.
Is it feasible to have an alternating schedule? As in .1 8month, .2 6month, .3 8month?
* Change the process to plan more features in advance (as much as this is realistic given we mostly ship what our upstreams deliver) and work together to achieve these
As much as I like feature driven releases, they are just not relatistic to agree on in the project we're in. No matter what schedule we had in the past, there were always the voices to delay for X or Y.
We will never be able to fit in all feature releases at the same time, so I don't think this is a good approach. Having a schedule that we stick to and leverage things like Tumbleweed and re-spins/key repos should catch most things. The key is to set a time scale and stick to it. Just my tuppence haypenny's worth. Andy -- Andrew Wafaa IRC: FunkyPenguin GPG: 0x3A36312F -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org