Enhancing Our Fedora 13 Release Criteria

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2009-11-20 at 15:43 -0800, John Poelstra wrote:
> I've been been thinking for a while that it would benefit us to rework 
> our release criteria 
> (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Criteria) from being just 
> a description of blocker bugs to more about the broader criteria that 
> needs to be met to issue a public release.

I was talking to James Laska about this earlier today, and we both have
thoughts on it too. I think it's a great idea to have revised and more
detailed criteria, and I especially like the organization - a main page
with an overview, and detailed criteria for each release.

I had one major high-level suggestion. Release criteria are more or less
unavoidably partially subjective. I don't think it's feasible to come up
with concrete rules to cover every possible situation. Therefore, the
criteria should explicitly embrace and cover this subjectivity. It
should be made clear that things like 'boots successfully' are to some
degree dependent on subjective, contextual judgements; do we block the
Alpha for a bug that stops 0.1% of systems booting? 0.5%? 1%? 5%? I
think rather than trying to define something like this, we should just
explicitly acknowledge that it'll be a judgment call.

I also had a more low-level suggestion. It would be a good idea to go
back and look at the list of bugs that were accepted as blockers for the
pre-releases and final releases for F11 and F12, and make sure the
proposed criteria match up pretty well with those lists. Especially we
need to consider basic polish issues; historically we've considered
things like broken icons or bad spelling or whatever on the default
desktop to be 'blocker' issues, even though objectively they aren't very
serious. That's the kind of thing we should look back and make sure the
new criteria cover.

I'll try to post a more detailed response to the current proposed
criteria as well, later, but wanted to get my general thoughts in
first :)

thanks for starting this!

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net