On 09/11/2012 05:23 AM, 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 ;).
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
* 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
* Extend the release cycle keeping same process and longer stabilization period (effective 12.2 release process; leads to shipping 'outdated' stuff)
* 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
While more planned features sounds like an initial good idea, I also like the more free flowing nature of openSUSE development. However, on the feature part we should not forget that Fedora and Ubuntu are mostly driven by companies, while in openSUSE I'd like to belive we have a larger share of non SUSE employee contributed packages in the distro than in the other two distributions. Thus the "planned feature" part is much more tricky. Looking at the process and what we ship as a whole I think we have some serious issues, and I have 2 talks at osc where from my point of view we need some serious thinking and possibly disruptive changes. One issue is the process and how things are tied together, the other is package and project maintainership. But heeding Will's advice I am not going to write a dissertation now, come to osc!!!! While I believe we have some serious issues, that will only increase as the community grows if we do not address them, I also think we should get back to our "original" cycle, i.e. the next release should be in March. First, the issues as I see them will probably not get fixed in 1 release cycle, may it be 6 or 8 month, anyway. Second, I think what we have can certainly get 12.3 out the door in time. I strongly agree with Andrew that predictability is very important and I think we have done a good job with that except for 12.2. Important now will be that we get back to it, forget the slip ever happened and deliver again as promised. In the end we have to look at underlying issues to make the job of getting the distribution out the door on time easier. In the end a couple of people always have to do the heavy lifting at the end and that is a recipe for disaster. However, I do not believe that this is a root cause, I think that this is only a symptom of underlying issues. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org