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

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Wed, 2002-04-24 at 15:04, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Again dodging the main issue (I'll try to pick sides on it later ;-)

Hehe... I'm at least partially playing devil's advocate myself; through
the course of the discussion we've now heard a lot of positive reasons
why we should ship early so I'm satisfied the discussion has been
constructive, and I'm glad I started it, regardless of the conclusion.

> 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.

<snip> All very reasonable. 

> To me the community release should be focused on complete
> functionality,

How does this fit with completely dropping features that don't work, as
per the back-and-forth with Sander? I'm still very worried that in the
current state large chunks of nautilus and control-center will have to
be dropped or released unusably broken, which doesn't fit with 'complete
functionality.'

> [community release] 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.

Where is 99%? Are we there yet? I don't personally think we're there (or
even particularly close), but I can see that very reasonable people
would disagree with me on that, and I'd very willing to be overruled on
that count.

> 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.

If that is to be the case for 2.0, then either:

1) 2.0.0 needs a lot more work

or

2) we're going to have to push 2.0.0 and admit that the 'real' .0 is
2.0.1*. If that is the case, and we accept that the community wants to
get it out and work on other things, who is going to do 2.0.1?

Luis

*It was pointed out to me last night that 1.4.1 hasn't exactly happened
particularly quickly.</understatement> Anyone care to comment on why? I
was 'just a user' for 1.4.0 so I really don't know why.