Re: The future of the release team

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hey Maciej,

On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 19:35, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 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.

	That certainly sounds fairly reasonable, but in practise we've been
splitting up these tasks very successfully. There is a small bit of
overlap between the people doing the different tasks, but not much.

	And I agree that you don't want random people taking up these tasks
without the ability to do a good job. But its no different from any of
the other responsibilities in GNOME - e.g. you don't find incapable
people taking up the maintainership of unmaintained modules. Most people
are aware of their capabilities and don't generally volunteer for tasks
unless they're pretty sure they're not going to embarrass themselves.

	What worries me more than the risk of things getting screwed up by new
volunteers is the risk of people who would like to help might never get
the chance to.

	It wouldn't always have been possible to do it this way, but things
have evolved such that the release process chugs away with only
relatively minor babysitting from us. And that's a good thing.

Cheers,
Mark.