A tale of fixed release schedules

Alan McKinnon alan at linuxholdings.co.za
Sun Mar 19 16:17:18 GMT 2006


On Sunday 19 March 2006 15:11, John wrote:
> javier wrote:
> > The blog points out to other delays (fedora and suse) so I
> > believe it's saying something like fixed released are VERY
> > difficult to accomplish and don't believe anyone saying so.
>
> I don't know about SUSE (or Dapper), but part of the problem with
> Fedora is an ineffective freeze.
>
> Ooo, there's a new gcc. Lets just rebuild everything with that....
> So a delay.
>
> I think, without checking, another was caused by "Ooo, another
> Gnome. Let's use that!"

It's called "feature creep"

> Carried to extreme, this will result in another never-releasing
> distro like Debian.
>
> I have little doubt that, had FP kept to the original bounds set
> for the FC5 project that it would have been able to release the
> product on time
>
> I'm a little concerned about Fedora, I intended to install FC5 on a
> laptop, but now I'm wondering how it can have been tested
> adequately.

FC seems to have lost focus since RedHat went their own way and the 
community seems not to have recovered. Community-building is fine, 
but there also needs to be a clear acknowledged leader pointing the 
way forward, and FC doesn't seem to have that

> As for Dapper, I said I haven't followed the reasons for its delay;
> I always thought though that while the fixed-length release cycle
> was an interesting, even a good, idea, that the challenge might
> prove too much.

There's really only one way to manage a big project like a distro and 
still stay sane - feature freeze. X time before release, someone 
makes a decision that we will use this KDE version, that Gnome, the 
other OOo and no, it will not be changed.

If the next release is slated for say Gnome 2.12 then 2.14 goes in 
testing. Trying to always have the latest stuff in a release can be 
done if there is tight integration with upstream, but it's also prone 
to breaking at the last minute with dire consequences. 


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five



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