Fedora release criteria completely revised

[John Poelstra]

Adam Williamson said the following on 12/08/2009 07:12 AM Pacific Time:
> On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 15:07 +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>> Plus, why was the KDE SIG not invited? (We had at least 4 KDE SIG folks 
>> present at FUDCon.) 
> 
> We had a pre-hackfest meeting for the whole FUDCon attendee list where
> everyone who wanted to hack on something stood up and announced what
> they would be hacking on. John Poelstra announced at that meeting that
> we would be gathering to work on the release criteria. The KDE people
> who were at FUDCon were at that meeting, so they were in a position to
> know about the work. I was running around all day telling people what we
> were working on, it wasn't a secret.
> 
>> Are you planning to ship Fedora 13 even if the KDE Live 
>> image is broken?
> 
> That depends on whether you want us to or not. :) If a SIG has criteria
> they want to add to the list, and they can commit to fulfilling those
> criteria and be willing to take the responsibility of causing a release
> to slip if they _don't_ fulfill them, we can certainly add those to the
> lists. If KDE has minimum functional levels for the KDE spin that they
> can commit to, please do send them to this thread and we'll look at
> putting them in the criteria.
> 
> We intentionally didn't specifically address the issue of the relative
> 'importance' of spins in the criteria as it's a difficult topic and one
> that's not really appropriate to decide in this place. The existing
> criteria didn't address this either - they didn't say anything about
> _any_ spin having to be not 'broken' before we ship - so there's no
> change there.

This is a good clarification that we should add to the criteria page--it 
only speaks to requirements to release our default offering.  It is also 
a framework to add more detail to once the "Target Audience" discussion 
is finalized.

The Fedora QA process, for as long as I've been near it has focused on 
the "default offering" which has the Gnome desktop.

I don't speak for the QA group, but to my knowledge Fedora QA has never 
officially tested or been responsible for testing any of the spins, 
including KDE.  When I was part of the spins process it was understood 
that each Spins team was responsible for testing their spin.

It would be a mistake to take the new release criteria pages and attempt 
to mold them to make them be "all things to all Spins."  Just as each of 
the public releases (Alpha, Beta, and Final) have different target 
audiences, so do the spins themselves.

What would make sense would be for each of the Spins SIGS to copy the 
release criteria pages and mold their own from them. The Fedora QA Team 
already has enough things on their plate and they are doing a great job, 
but don't muddy the waters by trying to mix two target audiences into 
the same release criteria.

John