Re: Preliminary Gnome 2.14 Schedule

[Paul Drain <pd cipherfunk org>]

> There are some specific issues I'd like to address:
> 
>   - In past releases, we did not specify an exact time when tarballs
> were due nor when
>     freezes began.  This ended up causing some misunderstandings, cut
> down on testing
>     time, and made it harder for release-oriented projects (e.g. live
> cd, garnome).  So I'd like
>     to make this precise.

This would be great. One of the biggest issues a project like GARNOME
has is the time it takes to run up a full testing platform on a box --
In 2.8.x, 2.10.x and 2.12.0, tarballs kept arriving on ftp.gnome.org
right up until the release notes were published, which made it hard to
get something that matched the released code out at the exact moment
upstream was ready to go.

If someone was to say, "$(time) UTC on $(date) is the cut-off" -- it
means the 'core GARNOMEies' who assist in it's development can say
'there are X hours to compile everything, work around any last minute
glitches and write some release notes' -- and the whole process becomes
much easier from a maintainer POV.

> The specific solutions I'm proposing are:
> 
>   - Tarballs are due by 23:59 UTC on the Monday specified
>   - Freezes begin by 23:59 UTC on the Monday specified
>   - Extend the schedule by one week to push feature freeze back
>   - Put 2.12.1, 2.12.2, and 2.12.3 on the schedule
> 

Sounds sane enough, nice to see stable point releases on the roadmap,
btw :)

Paul