Re: the future of the release team

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi Mark:

You might have read too much into my email.  I think the current process
is pretty robust too.  And I don't mean that I or any maintainer don't
have a vested interest in the release process - of course we do.  

My point it that there are details of the process which are mostly only
of interest to maintainers if they appear to have noticeable
side-effects, e.g. nobody cares if it's not obviously broken.  It would
be preferable if the process as seen by developers who aren't part of
the group-formerly-known-as-release-team remained unchanged.  

Any changes to established processes are like changes to interfaces;
they inevitably generate errors even when they are self-evident
improvements.  So let's not change the interfaces unless they clearly
need improving.

- Bill

p.s. - freezing-hard-asses is too many keystrokes, how about
bollix gnome org ?

On Fri, 2004-09-24 at 14:02, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 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.
>