Re: Proposed Freeze Change

[Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>]

[CC'ing release-team and gnome-i18n@.]


On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 13:21 -0400, Shaun McCance wrote:
> In the past, we've had three points in the schedule to help:
> the UI change announcement period, the feature freeze, and the
> UI freeze. Feature freeze is gone from the 3.3 schedule, which
> confused me a bit, but I want to propose something different
> anyway.
> 
> The main problem is developer awareness. Developers don't know
> exactly what constitutes a change that the documentation team
> cares about. And it's sometimes hard to keep of which freezes
> and announcement periods are in effect. Two-fold proposal:
> 
> 1) Drop the UI change announcement period. It was a nice idea
> at the time, but it just doesn't help me much. It's not worth
> the developer mental overhead.
> 
> 2) Merge the old feature freeze and the UI freeze into one big
> freeze and call it something that suggests you're not supposed
> to make changes. I've been calling it THE freeze. I'm not good
> at naming things. Beta freeze? Software freeze?
> 
> I had wanted to do the freeze with the 3.3.5 release, which is
> where we would do feature freeze. But I fear it doesn't make
> sense to do it before the Brno hackfest.
> 
> When we're in the freeze, you don't make user-visible changes
> anymore. No new supported formats or protocols or backends.
> No new UI. No changes to how a user interacts with the UI.
> You can fix crashes and address performance problems.
> 
> In case you're worried this will stifle development, remember
> that you have 21 weeks to go wild. That's 80% of the entire
> cycle. And all you have to do to make a change is send an
> email (or if we go with Bastien's proposal, file a bug). In
> eight years, I only remember blocking one change proposal.


For the time being I have added back a "Feature Implementation Freeze"
to https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointThree for 3.3.5 (Feb 06th).

I'd like to see a few more people (or at least more r-t folks) agreeing
to 
1) merge Feature Freeze and UI Freeze (which is at 3.3.90 currently) to
"UI and Feature Freeze" and propose a date, and 
2) whether to drop "UI change announcement period" completely.

Consequently the same question goes for "String Change Announcement
Period" - CC'ing gnome-i18n as I'm wondering if translators still
consider the "String Change Announcement Period" useful.

andre
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