Clarifying Feature Freeze Definition

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Aug 05, 2011 at 11:17:22AM -0500, Kate Stewart wrote:
>    In asking around and after reading the documentation I'm hearing some
> varied opinions of what it actually means to feature freeze.  On reading
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FeatureFreeze,  it seems to not be as specific
> as needed.

I'm basically in agreement with Scott here.

Also, could you share some of the varied opinions you've been hearing?
I think that generally folks on this list are roughly on the same page
and we're all pretty near the centre of the information firehose, so we
may not be in a good position to guess what confusion others are
suffering from.

> In WIKI it states:  "For the purpose of the FeatureFreeze, the upload
> date matters, i. e. all packages which are in the NEW queue by that time
> will be processed without the need for an exception."
> 
> So my question areas are: 
> 
> 1)  Is everyone comfortable with this comfortable with using upload date
> and NEW queue?   How long after it being in the NEW queue does it need
> to be processed by?   I think we need to aim for them all to be
> processed within the week, but would like to hear what's reasonable from
> the AAs.

I'm comfortable with the wiki's definition, and I think we can be
reasonably fluid in applying it.  The point is just to have a cut-off
for developers to get the core feature done on their side, more as
expectation management than anything else, and yes also to manage
archive admin workload.  We also don't want to penalise developers for
any archive admin slowness.

Setting a target of a week for processing sounds reasonable.  There are
currently 13 source entries in the NEW queue.

> 3) by feature freeze, all new images for the manifest should be building
> daily images?  (I consider a new hardware platform as a feature ;) ).

Basically yes, although I believe we've already discussed the new-style
USB images and agreed that those will slot into place next week.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]