Re: Planning releases

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Havoc,

Would the solution be to have a Releases Committee that reports to the board?

Bart

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Joe Shaw <joe@helixcode.com> writes:
> > I think the reasoning behind it is to dictate a release schedule for the
> > major releases of GNOME. What is included in GNOME? That's what the board
> > will decide. For example, what is GNOME 1.4? Is it gnome-libs
> > 1.4? gnome-libs and gnome-core? All of the gnome-* packages? All of the
> > gnome-* packages, Evolution and Nautilus? All of the above plus gnumeric,
> > X-chat, gnutella, gdm, et cetera?
> >
>
> I don't know if the board would decide release plans. This is almost
> certainly _the_ big decision that GNOME ever has to make; historically
> it's a big gnome-hackers flamewar, and it's a point of much contention
> in the steering committee too.
>
> This is also an area where companies are strongly biased.
>
> My impression is that in many free software projects, a release is
> simply never made, or is made at ridiculously long intervals. cf. Gimp
> or Debian or even the Linux kernel. I wouldn't mind having some way to
> avoid spending 2 years between releases, and that means someone or
> some group with the power to say "sorry, your package or feature ain't
> in the release". Technical requirements are not going to delay a
> release 2 years; GNOME isn't that complex. But politics might.
>
> Anyway, releases are the real hot potato. I think working code can
> always decide a technical issue; projects can always ignore each other
> even. And no one cares that much if we buy a new drive for the CVS
> machine. But for releases, everyone _must_ work toward the same goal,
> and everyone has quite a strong opinion about what the release will
> contain and when they'd like it to happen.
>
> So, we should have a clear statement in our bylaws or whatever about
> how we make release decisions. (And it would be nice if the
> decision-making process was a good one.)
>
> I imagine the board would be much less controversial if it only did
> the things I mentioned in my previous mail (contact with companies,
> advocacy, money, etc.) and ignored releases. Maybe we should consider
> that. I'm not sure.
>
> Havoc
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-list mailing list
> foundation-list@gnome.org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list