Releasing Alphas and Betas without "freezing"

[Didier Roche]

Le 20/06/2012 08:07, Rick Spencer a écrit :
> I think this was a very productive discussion. We considered a lot of
> possibilities from a lot of angles.
>
> All told, I think there are four points under discussion. I'd like to
> tease them out so we can move forward.
>
> Question 1: shall we stop freezing the archive at milestones?
> I believe there is not 100% consensus on this point, but enough
> support to try it for Alpha 2, a la Theirry's suggestion.
> QA Team/Foundations Team, do we/will we have the tools in place for Alpha 2?
I'm supportive of those as well. We really have to shake ourselves if we 
want to get in a state where we are clearly confident that no breakage 
happens anymore on the devel release, and this is a good step forward to 
help ourselves getting there quicker, even if we don't have the quality 
tool enough, we can clearly back that up with manual testing meanwhile.

This cycle, the next step for Unity and all related components is that 
each release is potentially the last one that is uploaded to ubuntu 
until the finale release. So, each version is a possible release 
candidate for Quantal. I do not want anymore to see half-backed unity 
features coming in. This is only possible now thanks to the huge quality 
increase we had last cycle and that we finally reached the feature level 
that we can expect from a UI. So, all extras should be precise, 
polished, reliable before getting into ubuntu.

So, removing the milestone freeze is completely aligned with that vision.
>
> Question 2: shall we stop having milestones altogether?
> This question arose in thread. I don't believe there is consensus for
> doing this suddenly in 12.10.
Milestones are great for the "marketing part" and engage people testing 
a version because it's an alpha, or beta. However, our first alphas are 
not alphas the same way the other products are IMHO (the alphas are more 
for them "we implemented almost all new features we wanted, but it's not 
stabilized at all". It can bring some confusion maybe?
>
> Question 3: shall we increase the rate of manual testing?
> This question also arose in the thread. I think there is widespread
> consensus that we should do this, and it is not actually related to
> the other questions.
> Community Team, is it feasible to increase the rate of full manual
> testing runs to every 2 weeks or similar?
It was a hard job to keep regular contributors (reporting high quality 
results)  tight redoing serious testing every 2 weeks for unity 
releases, but I'm completely confident Nick can do this job. :)
>
> Question 4: shall we keep snapshots of the development release so that
> we can "bisect" more easily and find when bugs were introduced?
> This question also arose, and also is not tied to the other questions.
> QA Team, is it feasible to keep a set of snap shots somewhere for this purpose?
>

That would really be awesome, especially if the reporting QA tools get 
better and we can run an older iso under a vm in a minute to just test 
something quickly :)

Cheers,
Didier