Re: [gentoo-releng] 2004.2 planning

[John Davis]

On Sat, 2004-05-01 at 20:14, Kurt Lieber wrote:
> On Sat, May 01, 2004 at 11:17:24AM -0400 or thereabouts, John Davis wrote:
> > Kurt -
> > I've been thinking this over for quite awhile now and have vacilated
> > between continuing quarterly releases and moving to something else.
> > After much thought (and believe me, there has been a lot - during 2004.0
> > I wanted nothing to do with quarterly releases), I have decided that for
> > the immediate future, quarterly releases are the way to go for the
> > following reasons:
>
> I don't agree.  We should put this on the next manager's meeting as an
> agenda item.  As it stands, I'm not willing to support quarterly releases
> from an infra standpoint.  If the rest of the management team decides we
> should, then I will do my best.  As it stands, I think this is a huge waste
> of time, resources and development effort.
>
> As a general rule, I think basing releases on time, rather than features,
> is a poor way of defining release goals.  I think gathering feature
> requests (as you have been doing so far) is a great idea.  I think we
> should then (as a management team) decide what features need to make it
> into the next release of Gentoo, decide how much time that will take to
> implement and then set a target release date based on that.  We should
> release based on features, not on time.
>
> --kurt

Kurt -
I respect your opinion, but I do believe that you are rushing into a
decision that has no factual basis. Quarterly releases have not even
been going for a year and because of this there is not substantial
evidence against them. The fact is that quarterly releases benefit the
user as they are kept up to date every quarter.

Gentoo cannot go back to the old style (pre-2004.0) style of releases.
The nature of our distribution does not allow us to do this. I guarantee
you that if we do go back to the old style releases that we will be in
the same boat as we were with 1.4 - feature creep and constantly late
deadlines. Not only does this make Gentoo look bad as a distribution,
but it leaves our users out in the cold as GRP, a feature that users
very much enjoy, becomes useless due to its age.

The goal of quarterly releases is *not* meeting a deadline, but rather
providing our users with up-to-date release media for their convienence.
I do not understand why you are rushing into your decision that 
"quarterly releases [cannot be supported] from an infra standpoint" -
2004.1 went great from the infra side. There were no problems, and
2004.2 is going to be even better now that we know exactly what to do
with the bit flip method. Even without you there to look over things,
the release went out without a hitch.

Bring it up with the rest of the managers if you want to Kurt, but I
assure you that it is the wrong decision to do so. Quarterly releases
work for us devs, for the users, and for Gentoo. If you really are set
on doing releases 1.4 style where features like GPG signing hold the
release back forever, fine, but you are not doing what is right for our
users.

Please think about what I said earlier about the dual feature lists -
one for releng release specific features, and one for broader gentoo
specific features. Things like UTF8 integration and GPG signing have are
not something that releng can directly control, therefore, the
responsibility should not weigh on releng's shoulders to complete them,
but rather their own respective sub-projects.

Regards,
//John 
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