F9 Feature Process

[Christopher Aillon]

John Poelstra wrote:
> 4) How do we (realistically) encourage people to keep their feature 
> pages up to date?  It was a pain to keep hounding people to keep the 
> status of their pages up to date--very few people kept them updated 
> every 2 weeks.  Considering how short our release cycle is I don't think 
> we can go much longer than that.

Before we ask this question, first ask what do we gain vs. lose from 
people updating the page every two weeks?  Do we gain anything?  Not 
much, really.  We get a false sense of security that it will get done on 
time or it won't get done on time.  A feature can get lots of work early 
on and then the maintainer(s) go AWOL and leave it at 70%.  Or there can 
be no updates for a long while as they are doing other things and then 
it gets done within the final two weeks before freeze.

And we lose engineering time from having to update the page.  For some 
of our contributors who are not paid to work on Fedora, this could be a 
non-insignificant portion of the time they can allot to Fedora.

Is it really worth getting people to update their feature page every two 
weeks?  I'd argue it's much better to start looking for updates in the 
week or two prior to the freeze as those will be more meaningful.  We 
should also encourage people to update their page regularly (or when 
their feature is completed), but I'm not convinced that enforcing this 
is a good idea.