Back to 6 month schedule?

[Chris Ball]

>> On Tue, 23 May 2006 17:22:46, Jose' Matos <jamatos at fc.up.pt> said:

   >   Not only that but it makes us dependent on an external
   > entity. What if gnome developer decide (rightly IMO) that they need
   > more time to release 3.0, do we change the schedule then?

   >   Should we re-sync after?

   >   That is crazy. :-)

I'm not pushing for either schedule, but some points (mostly from
FUDCon) on why using a six-month schedule is not "crazy", and in
fact seems to be becoming de facto:

   * GNOME does it, as mentioned.
   * Xorg does it.
   * OpenOffice does it.
   * GCC is on a yearly cycle, so we'd pick up a new release roughly
     every second time.
   * The farther our releases are out of sync with these, the more
     work we have to do.
   * The lesson learnt from FC5 was that it hurts more than it
     helps us to have more than six months for a release.

As for getting GNOME packages the day before a release, no-one's
proposing that.  GNOME 2.16's scheduled for release on September 6th,
our current schedule is to release on September 20th.  Moreover,
GNOME's feature freezes line up with ours; it's not like there'll be
dramatically new code appearing while we're getting ready to push,
just fixes to the packages we'll have already been testing in Rawhide
for months.  I think GNOME has a well-deserved reputation for not
screwing up freezes and release dates.

Ubuntu also uses six month GNOME-tied releases (though their last one
overran, so they'll make Edgy tighter to catch back up).

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at mrao.cam.ac.uk>    <http://blog.printf.net/>