[Mageia-dev] Release cycles proposals, and discussion

[Michael Scherer]

Le lundi 13 juin 2011 à 14:20 +0200, Wolfgang Bornath a écrit :

> The 9-months seem to be a compromise - but I start to ask why we need
> such a fixed statement (which it would be, once published). We need a
> schedule for each cycle, that's true. Without a schedule we would
> never finish anything. But how about taking 9 months only as a "nice
> to meet" target, leaving us the option to set a roadmap after setting
> the specs of the next release - we could then go for a 8 or 10 months
> roadmap, depending on the specs.

As I said to Thomas, we will never use the 8 months option. If we say
"we have selected less features to finish sooner", people will just ask
for more features, and will say "why do you want to finish sooner, I
prefer to have feature and wait 1 month more". 

In fact, the same would go for 9 to 10 if we start to propose the
possibility. 

And deciding that we will decide later is not really deciding. We should
select features based on time needed to implement them and how much time
we can devote, not the contrary especially since no one will ever be
able to give precise timing for anything, so one month of difference
would be difficult to justify.  

And I think we can already decide to release 1 week later if a
release_critical bug appears. Fedora 15 for example was 2 weeks late,
because they changed the release date twice after having seen some
problem (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/15/Schedule ).

And we did it more than once at Mandriva.

> This being said, I am a friend of a rolling release like ArchLinux,
> but I fear that our main target group is not up to this. Despite of
> having to "burn yet another DVD" as somebody pointed out, the majority
> seems to see this as normal and a good way. Of course I may be totally
> wrong with this assessment!

Maybe people should maybe start to trust more mgaonline to do upgrade,
there is nothing that pacman does that urpmi don't regarding upgrade,
there is no magic involved : 
- people should test before the release and fill bug reports.

That's the secret behind debian upgrade, people just do lots of tests
for that either automated ( using something like piupart
( http://wiki.debian.org/piuparts ) ), or manual and lots of people do
full system upgrade long before the release ( and not only after ).

-- 
Michael Scherer