Re: The future of the release team

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 22Sep2004 11:33AM (+0100), Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 
> 	Right now, the release team can be defined by a small set[1]
> of responsibilities:
> 
>   1) Drawing up a schedule
> 
>   2) Ensuring release notes get written
> 
>   3) Defining the contents of each release set
> 
>   4) Reminding maintainers that tarballs are due, gathering those
>      together for each release, sanity checking and announcing
> 
>   5) Reviewing requests to break feature/API/ABI/code freezes
> 

These tasks seem pretty closely related to me, and I am not sure that
separate responsible parties for each would work very well. In
particular, consider #5. Does it really make sense to have a group of
one or several self-selected volunteers approving freeze break
requests? Clearly whoever is doing that needs to have good judgment
that others respect, and needs to feel some sense of responsibility to
the schedule and to the quality of the release. This is much more
likely to happen if this person shares in the responsibility for
drafting a schedule, defining the release contents, and reminding
others of the schedule.

So basically I think the idea of splitting all these tasks among
different people is unlikely to work well.

Regards,
Maciej