On Thu, Dec 08, 2016 at 09:20:50PM +0100, drago01 wrote:
>> Which problem are you trying to solve with those proposals?
> From my *other* other mail:
> * predictable calendar dates, to help with long-term planning
Longer cycles are not necessarily mean no slips.
I wasn't referring to slipping, but rather what happens when we
schedule by starting at the whenever a release ships and add 6-8 months
to that.
> * not being on a hamster wheel which routinely bursts into
flame
> [...]
> mechanism to users (GNOME, GCC, glibc, have spoken up before, but not
> limited to just those)
How so? By having less frequent releases we'd be skipping more of them.
Well, that's where the .1 release idea here came from, rather than just
going to purely once-a-year-.
> * maximum PR and user growth
How is less PR (only one event per year) instead of two lead into
"maximum PR" ?
Two releases a year ends up barely being an "event", so it's hard to
drum up new enthusiasm. I think that adds up to less interest total
than we'd get for an annual release. I don't have data for it, but as
someone working to do the drumming I'm inclined to give some weight to
my own intuition.
> nine-month cycles. That's not necessarily terrible, except
a) it's not
> well-aligned with upstreams and b) it makes longer-term planning
> difficult because release times are unpredictable year-to-year.
Longer term planning of what exactly? And by whom? Are you talking
about fedora's planning or the users?
Three things. First, Fedora's overall strategic planning. Second,
developers planning when and how to land features — especially ones
which will take more than one release. And yeah, finally, users, who
definitely want a predicatable lifetime and upgrade pattern.
> The alternative we just tried was: if one cycle goes over six
months,
> still target the next one as if it it _hadn't_ - that is, a shorter
> "make up" cycle. In this case, we came out with a great release (again,
> awesome work everyone), but we didn't have much breathing room (and
> ended slipping into the holidays again,
There is no evidence that we slipped into the holidays because of the
shorter cycle (it happens all the time, hence even you wrote "again"
;) )
But if we had a longer cycle, we could plan breathing room around not
doing that. Particularly, October-November-December-January is a
minefield while May-June is not so much.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader