Re: What are the community's goals for 2.0? [was Re: Getting serious about releasing]

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Luis Villa <louie ximian com> writes:
> To put it another way: I don't personally believe that the 2.0.0 release
> that Havoc outlined will be good enough for any vendor to ship*. 
> 
> <b>If it isn't good enough for any vendor to ship, is it good enough for
> the community to ship? Or should the community have high/higher
> standards?</b>
> 
> I don't know the answer to that question, but it seems to be crucial,
> and the community has to decide on it. I /personally/ feel that if it
> isn't good enough for vendors it shouldn't be good enough for the
> community, but people have cited legitimate concerns in this thread
> about why maybe that shouldn't be the case. 
> 

Again dodging the main issue (I'll try to pick sides on it later ;-)
my view having experience on the vendor side is that it's both
impossible and undesirable for the community to ship a
vendor-acceptable release.

The reason is that a vendor-acceptable release pretty much requires 

 - a hard-core freeze for a reasonably long time, this just stifles
   community development. The freeze is needed for stability, 
   for strings, for docs. Even if it was a good idea to shut 
   down the efforts of 300 people for two months, I doubt we 
   can manage to do it.

 - resolving integration-with-the-OS issues. There are tons of small 
   bugs and misfeatures that get fixed in this area.

I don't really see it as worthwhile for the community to worry about
doing these things, because it damages feature development and the
community isn't going to remove the need for vendors to do their own
freeze and integration work anyway.

To me the community release should be focused on complete
functionality, and good stability, but should aim for the 99% you can
get without having long freezes, leaving the last 1% to be done in a
vendor branch. Otherwise you lose a lot of the momentum of the
community release.

I think it's great that we have the sun-patches module, I'm thinking
of doing a similar thing for RH, and also putting the RH translation
freeze-and-branch in GNOME CVS instead of on i18n.redhat.com. i.e. I'd
like to see these last-1% branches out in the open and always folded
back when appropriate.

Red Hat 7.2 and Ximian GNOME are both a bit more than 1% branches
right now, and I don't want to repeat that for 2.0, though.

Havoc