Releasing Alphas and Betas without "freezing"

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday, June 20, 2012 09:13:17 PM Jono Bacon wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 8:52 PM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> 
wrote:
> >> For our current Ubuntu ISOs. Flavors currently are coordinating their
> >> own testing efforts. They could either latch into the two week
> >> cadence, or use their own cadence if desired.
> > 
> > I find it somewhat unfortunate that the "community" testing efforts
> > exclude the community sponsored flavors in the Ubuntu project.  I would
> > have hoped that the community team was not just about Canonical's
> > products.
> 
> This shouldn't be a particularly big surprise; Canonical supports our
> flavors with infrastructure, but we primarily focus our engineering
> and community team staff members on Ubuntu.
> 
> If we had more resources we would love to provide help for the
> flavors, and we are certainly happy to offer any guidance and advice,
> with with our current resources and staffing, Nick doesn't have the
> bandwidth to handle more the than the Ubuntu ISOs and associated
> testing. Saying that, I know Nick is in contact with many of the
> flavors to ensure they get the support they need to set up their own
> comprehensive testing plans.

Perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought that you were saying this was about the 
community team he had organized to support ISO testing.  Nothing to do with 
Canonical resources.  I think that such a team should not be focused on just 
Canonical products.

As a Kubuntu developer trying to get Kubuntu images tested for milestones, 
I've often gotten a lot of help from Canonical people in Ubuntu QA.  I 
appreciate that.  That's not what I'm talking about.

None of the non-Canonical flavors have the resources to pick up the pace of ISO 
testing.  If Canonical is insistent on reorganizing the development process in 
a way that works better for them (dropping milestones and more frequent 
testing), you're going to leave us behind.

Fundamentally the development and testing model has to be something that the 
entire project can support and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that 
the community team person assigned to work on QA would be trying to build a 
team of community members to accomplish that.  

Scott K