To freeze, or not to freeze

[Seth Vidal]

On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 11:31 -0500, Jon Ciesla wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 10:27 -0500, Jon Ciesla wrote:
> >> > A few weeks back the releng team made a schedule adjustment, to make
> >> up
> >> > for lost rawhide time due to the intrusion.  When we made that
> >> schedule
> >> > adjustment, we had assumed having a working rawhide within days of
> >> that
> >> > meeting, giving us a week or so worth of working rawhide to shake out
> >> > any pre-beta bugs we wanted to.
> >> >
> >> > Unfortunately, while we were able to /attempt/ rawhide creation as
> >> > scheduled, a series of software bugs and bad personnel timing has
> >> > prevented those attempts from producing usable rawhide images until
> >> > basically today (and today's are pretty shaky from what I hear).  This
> >> > is not so good, as without an installable rawhide, we don't get a good
> >> > idea as to how the installer is working, and we miss out on a lot of
> >> > 'initial install' testing of software on people's systems.  We get a
> >> lot
> >> > of "I upgraded from foo" type testing, which definitely has it's
> >> value,
> >> > but I feel we're missing a pretty key part of the rawhide experience.
> >> >
> >> > The Beta freeze is set for Tomorrow.  That means the content that
> >> would
> >> > show up in tomorrow's rawhide would also be the content we use as the
> >> > basis of Beta.  Any changes after that would have to be ran through
> >> the
> >> > releng/qa teams to be approved.
> >> >
> >> > Given the "fun" we had with Alpha, I really feel that it would be
> >> > prudent to spend a few more unfrozen days with a hopefully continually
> >> > working rawhide installer so that we can do some of that last minute
> >> > testing of what's wrong before we freeze, and hopefully have a shorter
> >> > and more productive freeze period.  But this is just my opinion, and
> >> > thus I'm putting this out there for discussion.
> >> >
> >> > Feature owners in particular, I'm interested in your opinions as to if
> >> > you need a few more days to see what shape your features are in before
> >> > we freeze.  Ideally the week before a freeze would have been a slow
> >> down
> >> > period, where large changes were avoided and bugfixing was focused on
> >> so
> >> > that the Beta was useful.  I feel like we didn't give you a chance to
> >> do
> >> > this and it'll still feel like crash landing planes on the carrier
> >> deck
> >> > when it come to features in Beta.
> >> >
> >> > I'm interested in what the rest of you think as well, both package
> >> > owners and testers alike.  If you think our schedule time would be
> >> > better spent fixing and verifying things pre-freeze and adding an
> >> extra
> >> > week to the schedule, or just freeze as things are, and potentially
> >> slip
> >> > a week during the freeze to make everything usable for the Beta (or
> >> the
> >> > third option, things are fine as they are, just freeze and release as
> >> > scheduled and stop being so paranoid).
> >> >
> >> > What say you?
> >>
> >> Wait a bit, maybe slip the release a week if you have to.  Better
> >> slippage
> >> than suckage, IMHO.  After the intrusion, I think users will understand.
> >
> > slipping the release a week gets complicated as we get dangerously close
> > to thanksgiving in the US which takes a huge number of contributors out
> > of the world.
> 
> Are you suggesting that after a large meal containing high quantities of
> starch, tryptophan, and alcohol, I might not be at my best?
> 
> For shame. ;)

No, I'm saying most of us don't want to work through that weekend.

I know I don't. :)

-sv