Re: 2.20 schedule

[Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas broadpark no>]

tor, 08.03.2007 kl. 02.34 +0100, skrev Andre Klapper:
> Am Dienstag, den 06.03.2007, 14:58 +0100 schrieb Vincent Untz:
> > Does anyone have some time to prepare a schedule for GNOME 2.19/2.20?
> 
> boy, this time it's really non-trivial. before doing this, i've dreamt
> of having the api/abi freeze one week earlier so everybody has enough
> time to fix build breaks. but reality can bite...
> 
> guadec is very late this year. i think everybody agrees that already
> being under api/abi freeze at guadec would be a huge motivation killer
> that definitely has to be avoided.
> 
I agree with this part.

> the other constraint is the opensuse 10.3 release which is planned for
> the end of september (the final date is not fixed yet), and they would
> love to include gnome 2.20 if possible.
> 
But I don't agree that we should adjust our schedule for $distro because
they would like to ship GNOME $version. We can't control their progress
and whether they stick to the schedule anyway, so I don't think it's in
our best interest to tighten our own schedule just to meet theirs.

If it matters enough for them they can adjust it so that they get the
bits they want. I think this applies to any large project that goes into
a distro after all.

> so i've pushed back the api/abi freeze date to be after guadec, by
> compressing the schedule at the end. this results in a pretty tight
> schedule, means: perhaps having one release less (sched1), or having an
> earlier 2.18.3 release (sched1&2) to lower the stress of the
> maintainers.
> 
> i have three schedule proposals at
> http://live.gnome.org/AndreKlapper/Sched1 (2.20 rel: sep 05)

This one seems to skip the 2.19.90 release?

> http://live.gnome.org/AndreKlapper/Sched2 (2.20 rel: sep 12)

Looks ok and it includes the 2.18.x releases so we can see how they fit
in. 

> http://live.gnome.org/AndreKlapper/Sched3 (2.20 rel: sep 19).
> please also see those pages for more info on the changes.
> 
Same as above, and a bit more relaxed. I'd go for this one
personally :-)

> the proposal i'm in favour for is the second one. the definitely best
> one is the last one, but i just don't know how much we want to care
> about novell? (yes, i've asked them for info on how much time it approx.
> takes them to patch and include gnome 2.20 into their release.)
> 
I'd be more worried about whether we can manage to get four releases out
in july/august with people going on vacation etc.

> i also wondered about the sense of having 2.even.3 releases, see [1].
> if we would have a stricter policy on which patches are allowed to get
> into the stable branch, we would probably get more distros back again
> into shipping updated stable releases instead of backporting explicit

Do you really think that lack of quality in 2.x.1, 2.x.2 etc is the
reason why distros don't ship them as full updates? Do we have any
numbers that show that we introduce more new bugs than we fix in the
stable series? I'd be surprised if that is the case.
 
> patches. this would also reduce the bugsquad workload and provide a
> clearer bugreport feedback to identify the important issues.

Please elaborate :-)

> vincent will pick up this issue in a seperate email (*poke*). ;-)
> 
/me pokes too

Cheers
Kjartan