Re: the future of the release team

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

Hi Bill,

On Fri, 2004-09-24 at 13:20, Bill Haneman wrote:

> Making the internals of the process more transparent can hardly be a bad
> thing, as long as we don't "fix" what isn't broken from the point of
> view of "non-release-team" maintainers and contributors.  (By
> "non-release-team" I mean people who do not wish to, or aren't in a
> position to volunteer for release-related activities which have been
> "release team" activities in the past.) 

	The release process isn't broken, and we don't need to fix it, but I
would like it to be able to evolve. Your mail makes it sound like the
process is a terribly brittle thing which will fall apart if we touch
the slightest thing. In fact, the process is extremely robust and seems
to work well no matter how much we mess up.

	There are real problems here which I think may bring us to a grinding
halt in time. You say you (as a maintainer) don't have a vested interest
in the internals of the release process? You mean to say that if we came
to a point where no-one drew up a schedule, no-one gathered and pushed
tarballs, no-one announced releases or no-one wrote release notes you
wouldn't care? Everyone has a vested interest in the internals of the
release process.

	In any case, about the only change you would see from this would be
that you would now mail freezing-hard-asses gnome org with freeze break
requests.

Cheers,
Mark.