Re: proposed 2.2 release schedule

[Glynn Foster <glynn foster sun com>]

Hey Luis,

In general, I think the schedule seems perfectly sane - it's a bit
easier to see the graphical representation on my whiteboard - we should
try and do this for the next time maybe? ;)

> *The marketing team feels strongly that we should aim for mid-January so
> that we can announce at LinuxWorld New York, which would be pretty cool.
> Much of the rest of release team is worried about hackers and their
> availability and willingness to hack during January. It's a noble goal-
> if we believe we can hit it. Thoughts/comments?

Yeah, I think mid January is probably pushing it somewhat, considering
most hackers won't want to spent their Christmas dinner with a laptop in
their hands. 

Currently we have mid December to early January slotted in for bug
fixing, so we're effectively discounting nearly a month of that time due
to the holiday period - that worries me slightly.

I think [and there seems to be general agreement] to make the 5 month
release cycle into 6 months...perhaps having another month of bug
fixing. Alternatively, and mabye this isn't a good idea, we could extend
the period of 2.2 hacking to the end of November.

Either way, I think pushing for mid January is probably a little
ambitious and we haven't even discussed the possibility of a slip yet :/

> *This doesn't touch the issue of API freezes for core libraries; /if/ we
> think this is going to actually be an issue then we really need to
> address it. 

There was a discussion at one of the recent release team meetings about
having a tiered freeze, starting at the lower level libraries and
gradually freezing them right the way up - this is probably a non-issue
for 2.2 since the API is well defined by now, but perhaps we could adopt
this process for future cycles?

> *Release numbering- what do maintainers think about numbering their
> releases based on the gnome release? i.e., 2.1.1.0 for the release that
> goes out with GNOME 2.1.1, 2.1.1.1 for the first snap release after
> 2.1.1, etc.? This is really sort of micro-managerial so we're reluctant
> to ask this, but it would help packagers and general organization. 

Okay, I think this will have to be a GEP at this stage. I'm not entirely
sure if I like this [or care for that matter] but apparently it does
confuse the users who are testing the tarballs. Perhaps something could
be done at the FTP organization level to solve this. Michael, comments
on using GEP here? :)

> *We need to think about criteria for the 2.0.x series and its releases
> in a separate discussion, IMHO, but it definitely needs to be talked
> about- who is going to do it, when it will be done, how we decide when
> it will be done, etc.

I assume we're talking about 2.0.x for x > 2, right? I think we've
pretty much agreed on a schedule for up to that. I'm not entirely sure
what we can do here - obviously if we want it to be maintained we need
people to hack on it...and I'm pretty curious to see if anyone will run
with the ball here...

				See ya,
					Glynn ;)

P.S. Luis will promise to donate his body for whatever cause if you 
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