A tale of fixed release schedules

[John]

Alan McKinnon wrote:
> 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"

We all have that, it just needs to be controlled.


> 
>>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

A fair few of the people in the project are Red Hatters, and it's 
(supposedly) controlled by Red Hat.

I'd say it actually suits Red Hat to have all the latest toys in FC. I 
regularly counsel folk not to use it for anything important and 
sometimes offend people by calling it a "rolling beta," but still people 
use it for their servers and other important things. To be fair, the 
"vendor" says to not use it for important things, but people do, just as 
they use Sid.

Anyway, FC5 hasn't been released, but it has leaked and already there 
are reports it won't boot on (some) laptops.



> 
>>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. 

We're singing in two-part harmony:-)