Fedora 11 schedule proposal

[Jesse Keating]

We (Fedora Release Engineering) would like to propose a schedule for
F11.  The reason I'm bringing this to F-A-B is that it is a departure
from our typical May1/Oct31 release dates.  This is due to the month~
delay that Fedora 10 has had already due to the break in.

Before I get to the schedule itself, I want to explain where we are
coming from, and what some of the drivers for this schedule are.

Fedora releases typically have a 6 month development cycle.  We target
specific dates for the release to give developers, end users, and
upstreams a target to shoot for.  Typically any slipping of a release we
do, we just shorten the next release to make up for it.  However a
month's time is quite a lot to shrink.  Especially because of the
significance of F11.

Fedora 11 will be extremely important to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(otherwise known as RHEL).  RHEL 6 planning has looked to use Fedora 10
and Fedora 11 as releases to work out new technologies and features that
are desired in RHEL 6.  This includes a lot of upstream work that is
being done, and targeted to land in these two releases.  That planning
was also planning for a full 6 month Fedora 11 cycle, and Red Hat
resources were lined up to take advantage of this, by participating more
in the development cycle, in the testing cycle, in bugfixing, etc...
This is a good thing.

However, if we were to take a month out of Fedora 11s schedule to hit
that May 1 date, we would shorten the amount of time we get the RH
attention, and we shorten the amount of time we give our developers to
land the pre-planned features.  This is not a good thing.  These are not
just RH developers for RH features either, it's all developers for all
features.

But wait, if we pad Fedora 11 by a month, what about Fedora 12?
Excellent question.  We (releng) feel that if we set up Fedora 11 with a
full 6 month schedule, and now set up F12 to take in some of that slip
and shoot for Oct 31 release of F12, all interested parties will have a
lot more time to prepare for a short release.  In fact, we could even
focus more on polish issues in F12 than large sweeping features, but I
leave that up to the developers.  We just feel that we can better plan
for a short release in the F12 time frame than we can in the F11 time
frame, and by doing so we can get back to our May 1, Oct 31 established
dates which work pretty well in the Linux ecosystem.  Of course, setting
an F12 schedule now would be kind of silly given that we don't know what
will happen during F11 (hey, look at what happened to F10!), but we can
at least have an idea of what we'd like to do in F12.

Long story short, here is a simple schedule we'd like to present for
F11.  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/TomCallaway/F11ProposedSchedule

Note that it is pretty basic, only a few dates are called out.  Also
those dates are somewhat subject to change.  We're mostly interested in
the end date of Tuesday May 26th.  The intra-schedule dates are given
mostly for reference, and we'll still need to spend some time vetting
them against trade shows, holidays, etc...  We'll also be filling in all
the other details that you typically see in a Fedora schedule, once we
reach an agreed upon strategy for F11/F12.

I'd like to see some conversation on this (or none if you all agree with
me) and a conclusion met within the next 2 weeks, that is at or before
the release of Fedora 10.

Thank you for your time and thoughts.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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