What next?

[Daniel Veillard]

On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 05:05:00PM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> >   Just skip one release, branch and you get 9 months to work without being
> > disturbed too much. It seems to me that a fair amount of users follow that
> > pattern too and don't update every 6 months, but every year or so (that would
> > be an interesting poll to set up on the fedora web site I think).
> 
> it doesn't work that way  b/c some of the stuff I want to do would stall
> out plans for anaconda and pup, as well, it plays into a lot of doodads
> we want to get more time moving on.
> 
> these projects are not islands unto themselves, they involve other plans
> too. Release coordination should be a discussion otherwise it's not
> really an integrated release.

  Can't you branch all 3 ? differential updates done to head can then
be merged back selectively when the branch is made the main trunk once
ready. In general I don't see why this is not possible, I would need
more specifics to understand. I assume it's about integrating the extras
which I agree may need deep structural change in some of the distro tools,
but I fail to see why this can't be done on a branch.

   Are you afraid of not having enough momentum if you branch to
   get this done ?
     If this is the case maybe this mean the plan must be brought up 
     more publicly to try to ensure sufficient community support on that
     branch effort.

   Are you afraid of the cost of merging back the branch as the main trunk ?
     Sure this is an annoyance but from a community perspective less
     than breaking the release cycle or the loss of momentum due to the
     larger gap between releases.

  "release early, release often" still rules in my opinion, fedora is not
just a distro it's also the key channel between a community of users and
a community of developers, increasing the time between releases weakens
that link a lot in my opinion, making it less valuable to both communities
which could result in a big loss of users to other reactive distros like
Ubuntu. Even if the ultimate goals of the big changes is to increase usefulness
to those 2 communities, the impact of delaying releases can be negative in
the end. That's why I'm suggesting to branch with a clear plan of what is to
be achieved, and expectation of when this would become the main trunk.

Daniel

-- 
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