release cadence for Q and R

[Scott Kitterman]

Steve Beattie <sbeattie at ubuntu.com> wrote:

>On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 02:48:58PM -0700, Allison Randal wrote:
>> Very valuable perspective, thanks. To other upstreams, do you have
>> similar or opposite needs?
>
>Perhaps this is just me being naive, but with upstreams, shouldn't we
>be emphasizing the Feature Freeze date rather than the actual Release
>date? That's the merge window deadline they should be targeting, and
>where the Ubuntu cadence should be most relevant. This is at least how
>the upstream I do release management for targets the Ubuntu releases.
>
>Going back through the previous calendars, it seems that we've had
>Feature Freeze be 9 weeks before release on non-LTS releases and 10
>weeks prior on LTS releases (until you go back to Feisty where it
>starts to deviate).
>
>I also note that looking at the current draft Q schedule and R
>schedules, Feature Freeze is tentatively marked in at 11 weeks and
>10 weeks prior to the respective releases. So even if the Q and R
>release cycles were moved to straight 26 week cycles, unless the
>Feature Freeze dates are also aligned, upstreams won't really have
>a 26 week cadence to target for development.
>
In general, yes. In the particular case I'm worried about having time before final freeze to integrate a bugfix update from KDE so release and the related freeze milestones are the relevant ones.

Scott K