Re: [gentoo-releng] 2004.2 planning

[John Davis]

On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 12:31, Pieter Van den Abeele wrote:
> A few words of caution for 2004.2:
>
> EXAMS EXAMS EXAMS
>
> On 30 Apr 2004, at 05:38, John Davis wrote:
>
> > 2004.1 did amazingly well.
>
> We didn't implement a single feature request, so it should be taken
> with a grain of salt.

I respectfully disagree, quite strongly actually. Although we did not
complete any of the feature request, which will be something that we
have to work on for 2004.2 (that is why I started the process so early),
we did get the release out on time and complete. Every release up to
2004.1 was late and broken; 1.4 was almost vaporware and 2004.0 was
late. We accomplished something that has never been done with Gentoo
before, and I see that as something to be proud of (not to say that we
have an enormous amount of room to improve).

>
> > In my time at Gentoo, I have never seen a release go so well. What
> > we did for 2004.1 was truly amazing work - each of you should be proud
> > as hell about what we got accomplished in that short amount of time.
>
> I would like to see that reflected a bit more in the press release for
> upcoming 2004.2. Nobody reads those boring release notes right now,
> they are hidden somewhere on the releng page and not linked from the
> press release.
> I'm not very inclined to keep writing them if livecds on the mirrors
> are not updateded (a simple typo in the bootloader config) when I have
> bugfixed (corrected typo) ones available.

Very good point. I dropped the ball with the press release and the
release notes, be assured that they will be part of a more concise and
information filled press release for .2.
>
> Another example: nobody knows there are optimized G5 32bit stages, that
> we've released a first experimental ppc64 livecd... If we don't say
> we're the first, then another distro will.

By all means, please post a news item on the g.o front page. Again, I
did not include them in the press release because I dropped the ball,
but you do not need releng's blessing to advertise your experimental
work. In fact, write up a news blurb for the front page and I will get
it published ASAP.

>
> > Okay, so here is the breakdown:
> >
> > To address #1 I have built a month+ of QA time into 2004.2 (please see
> > the link at the bottom for the link to the preliminary 2004.2 page).
>
> I need two weeks (8 days building, 2 days uploading) for building and
> releasing the ppc preliminary release (assuming no bugs occur). All
> features need to be completed by the 14th, and I'll take a snapshot
> from the building tool on the 14th, that leaves 4 days to actually
> implement and QA any new feature requests, because we're only deciding
> upon new feature requests on may 10th.

Let's ditch the preliminary release requirement then. I would much
rather have QA and testing over a prelim release. Will this work?

>
> Please also note that I have some developers in training that are
> crucial for 2004.2. These people will most likely become dev when the
> release has been build.
>
> > #3 is all plasmaroo and the genkernel team. Please contact him ASAP
> > with
> > your bugs - he is lightning quick about patches to fix problems :)
>
> genkernel is a bottleneck, because a new release is needed for each
> kernel we make a livecd .config for. And ppc has a lot of kernels to
> support (3x POWER, G3,G4,G5, pegasos, amiga, chrp, prep, oldworld) =
> 32bit + 64bit = G5, POWER
>
> I'd prefer to have kernel-sources with livecd config as default or
> something like that (see arch/ppc/configs/* in your kernel sources)
>
> For pegasos we need to be able to produce a <kernel,initrd> all-in-one
> file. dholm has patches
>
> We are intending to migrate our kernel stuff to kernel-2.eclass, johnm
> got the roadmap. The developer who is going to do that is currently in
> training, and will therefore not be able to do so before the release is
> build.

You need to open a dialog with plasmaroo on this one. Genkernel,
although used by releng, is not maintained by releng. Perhaps at some
point it can be in the future, but at this point in time, it is up to
you to get on plasmaroo to fix the problems.

>
> > Okay, the schedule for 2004.2 is much more lax than 2004.1. Please take
> > the time to look over the 2004.2 info sheet linked from the bottom of
> > this mail and provide me with some feedback with regard to the
> > schedule.
> > Again, I want to make this release as low stress as possible, so let me
> > know if I can adjust the schedule in any way to help complete this goal
> > :)
>
> see above
>
> Isn't it possible to just update the stages and GRP? I see no reason to
> make 4 full releases a year. (Actually I do see some, but not really
> flattering ones).

Quarterly releases aren't even a year old yet and are in the process of
being refined. Until they are, please bear with some of the issues that
come up. I very much so prefer quarterly releases because they keep QA
constantly going for the distro as a whole, and QA is something that we
have historically had problems with. I don't even want to think about
changing the quarterly schedule until we get another year under our belt
- we need to give it time to mature.
>
> > Ok, the last thing in this long e-mail (I swear :) is the feature
> > request. Please see the mail that I am going to send to -core and -dev.
> > Basically, I am going to field some feature requests and then hold a
> > meeting with all of you on releng to see what requested features are
> > feasible. I will keep you posted.
>
> Preferably as few as possible. >EXAMS<

In July, yeesh ...


Cheers,
//zhen
-- 
John Davis
Gentoo Linux Developer
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~zhen>

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