Releasing Alphas and Betas without "freezing"

[Robbie Williamson]

On 06/21/2012 02:00 PM, Stéphane Graber wrote:
> On 06/21/2012 02:34 PM, Robbie Williamson wrote:
>> So we've clearly heard the opinion of Kubuntu...are there any other
>> derivatives who wish to contribute to this discussion.  I for one, would
>> be interested in knowing/hearing how these suggested changes impact them.
>>
>> -Robbie
> 
> Starting with just a bit of nitpicking but it's something we agreed at
> UDS that we'd try to get fixed in everyone's mind :)
> We're "flavours" not "derivatives", "flavours" are fully integrated in
> the Ubuntu project and have been recognized as such by the various
> governance boards. I usually consider "derivatives" as referring to our
> downstreams like mint where they're indeed a derived product.
Fair enough, but then this wiki page probably needs changing to reflect
this:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DerivativeTeam/Derivatives

> 
> Now, speaking for Edubuntu, we don't feel like we could increase our
> testing frequency as we'll be increasing the number of platforms that
> we'll be supporting this cycle, don't have a lot of testers and
> generally don't feel the need for it.
> 
> In the past we were only supporting a desktop installation on i386 and
> amd64. This cycle we're extending the desktop support to i386, amd64 and
> armhf.
> On top of that, we'll be introducing Edubuntu Server this cycle, that'll
> still be installed from our single media but will add a good dozen of
> extra services to test.
> 
> 
> The upstreams Edubuntu is working with are perfectly aware of our
> milestones and freeze periods and make sure their releases land on time
> so we have to ask for very little freeze exceptions or last minute
> upload (I don't think we asked for much more than 2 FFe last cycle).
> 
> Changing the way we work after we agreed on the release schedule for
> this release would confuse our contributors and upstreams with no clear
> benefit for us.
> 
> 
> There are plenty of really good changes to the archive that are planned
> for this cycle as part of the archive reorg and increasing the use of
> -proposed, still with my Edubuntu release team hat on I don't think
> piling up changes is a good idea.
> I'd rather we do what we agreed on at UDS, try to encourage additional
> daily testing (because that never hurts, doesn't cost any development
> time and is beneficial) and discuss the next steps at the next UDS when
> we have concrete feedback on how these changes went.

Thanks for the feedback Stephane. I think you've make some valid and
reasonable points that we should consider.


-- 
Robbie Williamson <robbie at ubuntu.com>
robbiew[irc.freenode.net]

"Don't make me angry...you wouldn't like me when I'm angry."
 -Bruce Banner