Releasing Alphas and Betas without "freezing"

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday, June 21, 2012 11:25:09 AM Jono Bacon wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> 
wrote:
> >> I don't think it is unreasonable for Canonical to focus its resources
> >> on Ubuntu as opposed to the flavors.
> > 
> > I'm crystal clear that the Canonical community team's QA effort is focused
> > on trying to get the broader community to do QA on Canonical products.  I
> > think that's quite unfortunate.  Rather than just trying to get free
> > labor for Canonical, I would have hoped you wanted to make QA better for
> > the entire Ubuntu project.
> > 
> > This is in marked contrast to Daniel Holbach's efforts (which I've been
> > watching and appreciating, but not had much time to get involved with) to
> > bring new blood into the Ubuntu development process.  He's pursing the
> > kind of holistic approach I'd hope to see from your entire team.
> 
> We *are* working to "make QA better for the entire Ubuntu project",
> but the point is that our focus is on *Ubuntu* and our specific
> efforts don't extend to coordinating flavor testing. This doesn't mean
> we are ignoring our flavors, or are not happy to offer advice or
> guidance, but my team (Daniel included) is not focusing their efforts
> on helping specific flavors achieve their goals.
> 
> I myself am surprised that you find this surprising: while many of our
> efforts and programmes can bring value to the flavors (e.g. general
> developer growth, working with upstreams, translations work etc), we
> have rarely if ever assigned staff time to delivering on flavor work
> items.
> 
> This is purely and simple about resourcing. Canonical is a company,
> and it needs to invest its resources carefully: sure, we would love to
> support all the flavors with more staff time (not just Kubuntu), but
> we simply don't have the resources to do so. Importantly, though, we
> are not stopping flavors from doing this work themselves...we are
> still providing the infrastructure and help and guidance we can offer
> in doing this work.

We're talking about two different Ubuntus.  You're talking about Ubuntu the 
product defined by a set of images/metapackages/etc drawn from a subset of the 
Ubuntu Linux distribution's archive.  I'm talking about Ubuntu as a project 
which is bigger than either of those.  

Scott K