Release management thoughts for Dapper Drake

[Jeff Waugh]

<quote who="Martin Pitt">

> > > I think if we do want to do this "stable upstreams" release, the first
> > > things we should ditch are the above set and instead release with a
> > > known-good GNOME 2.12, Xorg 6.8, etc.
> > 
> > Nup, there are good, worthwhile reasons to continue with feature goals
> > such as these (remember, we're doing desktop support for 3 years, not 5
> > years).
> 
> I can only agree to Scott here. Jeff, if our feature goal is "provide the
> very latest Gnome crack", then your idea of providing known-good desktop
> software is not compatible with that goal in principle. 

What this proposal aims for is a compromise between taking the latest great
stuff, and our ability to ship a well tested system that we can support for
3 to 5 years. If we were being 100% conservative, we would continue breezy's
preview freeze through dapper, thus only making bugfix updates. I think that
would be a little extreme for us, so I proposed continuing breezy's UVF, so
we can concentrate much more on making sure our feature goals are rocking,
and have the benefit of core system bugs filed on breezy applying to dapper.

I too think that a 100% conservative approach would be good. But how likely
is it that we're going to do it? Not very. :-) A realistic compromise seems
like the order of the day.

> (FWIW, I don't think that we should generally forbid new upstream
> versions.)

I didn't propose that we forbid new upstream versions -> I proposed that we
not autosync them. :-) It's easiest to think about it as described in the
original email -> we continue breezy's UVF through dapper. That doesn't rule
out syncing on request.

> > Much of the software with immediate end-user benefit will be covered by
> > feature goals. The core system, and in particular server stuff, would
> > not.
> 
> OTOH, how many regressions on the server side did you actually see?

The ones we saw are the ones I'm not worried about. The ones we won't see in
a six month development process, without the benefit of breezy's exposure,
are the ones that we should be worried about. :-)

- Jeff

-- 
Ubuntu USA & Europe Tour: Oct-Nov 2005            http://wiki.ubuntu.com/3BT
 
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