Re: [gentoo-releng] 2004.2 planning

[Kurt Lieber]

On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 02:29:35AM -0400 or thereabouts, John Davis wrote:
> 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.

People who use GRP are but a subset of our entire user base.  You are
defining a release criteria ideally suited to that minority group, but
ill-suited to the rest of our user base.  Let's make a quick list of pros
and cons:

Pros:
----
* Provides up-to-date GRP sets for people who install using this method
* Sells more CDs.
* uh...

Cons:
----
* Requires too much time/effort from other projects.  Arches have to take
  take snapshots and build package sets.  Documentation has to update
  install guides.  Infra has to communicate with the mirrors about the
  10+ GB of data that will be produced as a result and the list goes on.
  This would be fine if each release delivered significant value over the
  previous released version, but it doesn't.  Which leads to my next
  point... 
* Releases are largely meaningless, comprised of nothing more than package
  updates for GRP.  (What were the new and/or innovative features planned
  for 2004.1?  How many did we actually deliver on?  Where are stackable
  profiles?  Where is emerge --security support?)
* Focused entirely on the installation of Gentoo, which is but a small
  fraction of the overall Gentoo experience.  Quarterly releases do nothing
  to improve Gentoo for the tends of thousands of users who have been
  faithfully running it for months/years. 
* Takes away focus from developing longer-term, more innovative solutions
  that will better differentiate Gentoo from the rest of the pack.  Every
  hour spent towards getting another release ready to go out the door is
  one less hour that folks can spend on other projects that will have a
  more widespread benefit to the Gentoo community as a whole.

> 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.

This is completely unsubstantiated and patently false.

> 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.

OK, so let's take those as two separate criticisms:

* Feature creep.  Only if releng does a poor job of managing releases and
  allows this to happen.  As I said previously, I would like us to define,
  as a team, the features that we want to see in the next release of
  Gentoo.  I would then see it as releng's primary responsibility to ensure
  people stay focused on developing those features and preventing external
  features from "creeping" into the distro.
* Late deadlines.  Again, where is emerge --security and stackable profiles
  support in 2004.1?


> 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.

You have *zero* metrics on what percentage of Gentoo users use GRP.  Thus,
your claim is completely unsubstantiated.  Also, as I pointed out earlier,
GRP *only* helps users during the initial installation of Gentoo.  It does
*absolutely nothing* for the tens of thousands of Gentoo users who, like
myself, have existing installations that they rely upon and expect
continued improvements to.

> 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.

You have one opinion.  I have another.  I'm a Gentoo user, first and
foremost.  Does my opinion as a user not matter?  A number of other devs
(who are also users) have spoken out against quarterly releases.  Do their
opinions not matter?

It bothers me that you have assumed that you know what is right for "our
users" despite the fact that you have done no actual research and have no
facts on which to base your claim.  It further bothers me that you seem to
be disregarding the opinions of pvdabeel, livewire, myself, weeve and a
number of other devs who have indicated that they have concerns and
reservations about the current releng process. 

--kurt