Stephen Gallagher wrote:
Intuitively, I completely agree with you. I want to have a last
warning
that I need to hurry up and land my changes before I miss my window.
But when I think about it further, I have other thoughts too. The schedule
is public and anyone can look it up at will, so it's not as if this is the
only warning they see. And there's actually net value to the Project as a
whole to *not* give the 24-hour warning. We've always had a high incidence
of mass changes arriving in the last 24-48 hours before each Freeze, which
generally translates into instability for a few days because people see it
as their last chance and land stuff that isn't ready. So I can actually
see an argument for *not* widely encouraging more people to land stuff at
the last minute.
We also do have the one-week notice the Tuesday before, which is probably
our best option; we should continue encourage people to land in the week
before Freeze and try to work out the instabilities beforehand.
I was not really talking about the announcements (though having a warning
BEFORE it is too late would be nice, indeed), but about the dates listed in
the table on the wiki.
Right now, they say what amounts to:
2018-03-06 Beta Freeze (*)
(*) You won't actually have even one second on the listed day to do your
change in. You should have done it yesterday. Ha ha, fooled you! And of
course there are no exceptions (unless the change qualifies as a Blocker
or Freeze Exception) because it's all your fault that you have not read
the fine print, so get lost!
Not that it really matters for me this time because the only change I would
have liked to land is not ready today either. (Falkon was only released by
upstream last week, and my package is still stuck in the review process.)
But still, the misleading freeze dates make me angry each time.
Compare with, e.g.:
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/18.04_Release_Schedule
Fedora:
Beta and Final freezes are in effect from 00:00 UTC of the freeze
day.
KDE:
All deadlines are due 23:59 UTC, but if you need a few more hours,
notify
someone from the release team.
So not only do they put the actual last day in the table rather than the day
it's already too late, but they also allow for extension requests in the
hours range.
Kevin Kofler