Releasing Alphas and Betas without "freezing"

[Rick Spencer]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 12:15 AM, Kate Stewart
<kate.stewart at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> For Alpha1, we did 2 respin sets after the first set was built,
> based on what the manual testing was finding and trying to get
> a set of ARM desktop images.  (Note: We did not have quantal arm
> desktop images until the week of alpha 1, and then didn't have them
> again with the dailies between 6/10-6/14).  Having milestones does force
> a focus on the full set of images.   Daily images and the automated
> testing are still mostly focusing on unit tests for the x86 desktop and
> server images in virtualized hardware,  and as Martin says,  the manual
> testing is still finding issues on the real hardware that are causing
> respins.

I believe there is widespread agreement on this thread that manual
testing is good and necessary. I also think there is agreement that a
faster cadence of complete manual testing than is accommodated by our
current milestones would be desirable.  I think it's fair to say that
we can move ahead with increasing the frequency of manual testing with
or without changes to our milestones. I will look to the Ubuntu
Community team to begin with this, as they don't believe they are
blocked by any other decisions to be made.

I think the question on the table is, shall we drop most milestones
altogether, or adopt a system such as Thierry suggests, where we use
the most recent "good" daily as the milestone image?

There is another question about what is the correct frequency of
previous images to archive for purposes of "bisecting". This is also
not directly tied to our milestone process. I suspect that a weekly
snapshot would be quite useful, but we would have to determine how and
where to store those snapshots, and for which images.

Cheers, Rick