brainstorming for UDS-N - Ubuntu the Project

[Scott Kitterman]

On Friday, October 01, 2010 05:17:41 pm Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 01, 2010 at 07:43:39AM -0700, Rick Spencer wrote:
> > 1. I would like us to talk about our Freezes and how we treat them. I
> > think certain projects are *always* breaking freezes. I would like to
> > discuss if we should stop allowing this, or should we change the process
> > to accommodate the needs of these teams, or, perhaps all is fine the way
> > it is. The recent Font FFE might be an instructive case to consider
> > specifically, but there are probably others as well.
> 
> One thing I would suggest looking at is if the projects in question are
> on mis-aligned release schedules.
> 
> Fedora typically releases after Ubuntu, and seems to have a shorter
> freeze period than us.  Thus, projects which set their release cadence
> to match Fedora's more than Ubuntu's will thus release late into our
> freeze, leaving Ubuntu with a difficult choice of breaking freeze and
> risking a late addition (and the potential of Ubuntu-specific
> regressions we have to fight late into the release), or leaving it out
> and being seen by the public as "behind the curve" technically.
> 
> Add to this the pressure from our collegues and internal/external
> customers who are depending on functionality, hardware-enablement, or
> other changes which upstream has put into the new release.  This leaves
> us with a tough choice between breaking freeze and risking late bugs,
> engaging in messy and time-consuming patch backporting, or disappointing
> the collegue/customer.

Additionally, having a 5 1/2 month and 6 1/2 month release cycles will 
complicate upstream coordination (even if it does help with internal resource 
levelling). I'm not even going to try to explain to upstreams that this is 
allegedly an even cadence.

Scott K