----- Original Message -----
From: "Ayal Baron" <abaron@redhat.com> To: "Dave Neary" <dneary@redhat.com> Cc: "arch" <arch@ovirt.org>, board@ovirt.org Sent: Saturday, March 9, 2013 11:31:15 PM Subject: Re: Proposal: Reorganization of the Project Management
----- Original Message -----
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/
Agree on both; feature nomination period is much needed as demonstrated by the responses Itamar got to his mail. I'd like to see some commitment to assist development &&|| testing the suggested feature coming from the feature proposer. As for roadmap, I agree as well, we should strive to have it charted and modify as needed. The biggest obstacle with such maps is how much the project is committed to it; when do you drop a feature which does not align with the map and when do you modify the map for the feature. I think this is resolvable mostly by discussions, and eventually a much needed map will help others as well.
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/disc...
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.
+1 on all of the above
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!
if we have a 6 month release cycle, do you envision 1-2 point releases? e.g. 3.2.1 2 months after 3.2 and 3.2.2 2 months after that and then after another couple of months 3.3?
* 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.
+100 on this one. This means that we need to make new features that require capabilities that are only available in specific versions of other components optional (not stop development on the one hand, but not break if underlying components have not been updated to latest and greatest).
I'm afraid today we are using some tools / concepts which are distro- specific. Still, the first step must be done in order to have ovirt available in other distro's. One of the most common questions I got in FOSDEM was about having a Debian packaging. So full ack from me on this one, knowing that it will take time and efforts.
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