Let's Discuss Interim Releases (and a Rolling Release)

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 10:09:04PM -0500, Michael Hall wrote:
> On 02/28/2013 06:01 PM, Ted Gould wrote:
> > I hope that we will.  My biggest worry with the rolling release 
> > methodology is that there is no deadlines for people to work
> > towards except the LTS deadlines.  This will then encourage more
> > polishing and refining, with a rush to an even bigger deadline.  We
> > could all say "you should be more disciplined than that," which is
> > a truism, but one that seems to ignore human nature.  So I hope
> > that there will be deadlines for the monthly releases that people
> > can target, and use for their own milestones.
> 
> I think we can use the 3-month UDS cycles for this, try and break down
> work items so that can be done by the next UDS.

We already had a problem that it was difficult to plan work more complex
than the six-month release cycle granularity.  Requiring everything to
be on a three-month granularity makes this even worse.  Sure, you can
try to break down work items, but you often need to retain more context
than that and our current planning style is often not very good at
retaining state unless you approach it with a lot of discipline.

I would suggest that it should be standard practice to be able to plan
to carry projects over, and that people shouldn't be required to
re-discuss things again and again if a project is already in progress
and going well.  This isn't to say that we don't sometimes need
iterative discussion and course-corrections; but there are also many
projects that are essentially uncontroversial where it's a waste of time
to keep showing up and saying "yup, we've got this far, seems fine".

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]