9:29 a.m.
Hi Mike,
On 03/06/2013 12:54 PM, Mike Burns wrote:
After having coordinated the 3.2 release with questionable success,
I
have some thoughts on the ways to do this better going forward. I
brought this up on the meeting last week, and was supposed to follow up
quickly on list with the proposal, so here it is.
I also have some thoughts on general release process and improving it,
and have discussed this a little bit with Moran already.
1. We need to have a group of stakeholders from each of the
projects/components in the our release that will make up the release
committee.
2. Members of that group should be available on the weekly meeting or
have someone else on the team fill in for them
3. There should be someone that is in charge of this group of
stakeholders with a preference for someone that is not tied to any one
sub-project.[1]
4. The person who leads the committee should run the weekly meeting
5. The person who leads the committee should track docs, publicity,
marketing, etc
My fear with this type of scheme is that the weekly meetings will
continue to be a focal point, to the detriment of getting engagement
from the community to get a release out the door (with everything that
entails, including docs, release notes, marketing and promotion,
packaging, translations...).
If you have thoughts on who could fill the leadership role or wish
to
volunteer yourself, please reply to this email.
Perhaps more important than the person is that we agree on the process
for getting releases, and that we get buy-in into that process.
I have previously mentioned GNOME as a good example for a release process:
GNOME release process: https://live.gnome.org/ReleasePlanning
This process talks only about time - if you want to release on date X,
you need a code freeze at X-4 days, a string freeze at X-3 weeks, etc.
It does not describe the frenzy of release-related activity that happens
after these freezes, or the branching policy that most projects have.
For example, after the string freeze, translators and documentation
people kick into high gear. After the UI freeze, we start taking
screenshots for release notes and doing screencasts. After the feature
freeze, the release team starts hammering home the release blocker bugs
for the release, and we increase the emphasis on integration testing.
Another nice GNOME feature is the feature proposal period, when features
are proposed and discussed on the developer mailing list, and then
prioritised by the release team. I think we could mix and match this
nicely with a roadmap process like the one I proposed previously here:
http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/02/07/drawing-up-a-roadmap/
In fact, I don't think GNOME's branching policy is terribly good -
development happens on trunk through to the release, and then a release
branch is made. I would prefer to see release branches made when the
code freezes (or even feature freeze) comes in, to allow people to
continue committing complete but too-late-for-release features to trunk.
Max Kanat-Alexander from Bugzilla wrote about the value of doing things
like this, even though it makes life harder for the core team:
http://www.codesimplicity.com/post/open-source-community-simplified/
There's an extended mailing list thread on the subject:
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.apps.bugzilla/Ug9aoykXpRc/d...
In brief: when you freeze, you lose non-professional developers who just
stop working on the project until after the release. So it's worthwhile
keeping the trunk open, and doing your feature & code freezes on a
release branch.
Here's a link on the value of timeboxed feature planning and having a
hard go/no go for features that get in or don't (especially the advice
close to the end):
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html
In short, you prioritise features, and start working on the most
important ones, and then the ones that are not ready to ship by feature
freeze get deferred to the next feature prioritisation discussion.
General advice based on my experience with oVirt:
* I recommend a 6 month cadence with ~4 months feature development and
~2 months release preparation
* Ensure that documentation, release marketing and website updates are
included in the release plan
* Move regular release prep to arch@ - the weekly meeting hasn't been
effective to getting people engaged in the release process. The
real-time meetings will be good for the release team you've proposed to
sync up and agree on what the blocker bugs are, but you really need to
have people reading those threads and prioritising their work to align
with that
* Make regular point releases (alpha, beta 1, beta 2, RC1, whatever
they're called) before and after a release. I'm looking forward to 3.2.1!
* Avoid tying oVirt releases to a specific release of an operating
system (be it RHEL 7 or F18). I know that F18 was a special case and
complicated things because of significant platform changes, but we still
need to support F17 and CentOS 6.3/4 for this release, and hopefully
next release we'll also be adding Debian & Ubuntu support.
I would love to hear feedback/see how we can ensure that all this
happens for this coming release. Step 1 is to prioritise the feature
requests we gathered from the community (and from the oVirt team) and
say what we would like to achieve with the 3.3 release and beyond.
Cheers,
Dave.
--
Dave Neary - Community Action and Impact
Open Source and Standards, Red Hat - http://community.redhat.com
Ph: +33 9 50 71 55 62 / Cell: +33 6 77 01 92 13