Lucid Release Schedule

[Matthew East]

Hi,

The schedule for Lucid Lynx appears to have changed radically in
comparison to the previous few releases. I haven't seen any discussion
of this on this list, did I miss it somewhere else? There isn't a
reservation on the page about whether it has been finally decided on
or not, but I'm hoping that some discussion is going to be possible
because the revised schedule is unworkable for the documentation team,
and probably for translators too, as far as I can see

I'm setting out what I see as the problems here.

In the last three releases (Hardy, Jaunty, Karmic), we have had two
weeks between FeatureFreeze (FF) and UserInterfaceFreeze (UIF), and
three weeks between UIF and DocumentationStringFreeze (DSF). In Lucid
however we have FF and UIF on the same day, and DSF one week later.

The main problem for the documentation team is that a five week period
between FF and DSF is now squeezed into one week. The upshot is that
the documentation team has potentially one week to document new
features or string changes in Lucid.

>From the documentation team's point of view, we need a decent period
(2-3 weeks) between FF and UIF so that we can give ourselves a target
of getting major new documentation of new features ready by UIF. We
then need a further decent period between UIF and DSF (2-3 weeks) so
that we can focus on ensuring that all the strings referred to in the
documentation match those used in the software.

Translators of documentation also get a pretty raw deal. The
NonLanguagePackTranslationDeadline was two weeks after DSF. Now it's
just one week after. So translators then have one week to translate
any new documentation, which could include major documentation of new
features. Again, I'd like to be in a position to assure translators
that major new documentation is in place by UIF, so they can start
work from then, and then assure them of a hard freeze at DSF, where
they can focus on completing any last strings. At the moment, that
simply isn't possible.

I also see, although this doesn't directly affect the documentation
team, that the LanguagePackTranslationDeadline is in week 20, instead
of week 26 (Karmic), week 24 (Jaunty) or week 25 (Hardy) which gives
them between 4 and 6 fewer weeks to translate software.

I'd really like to see the timetable used in previous releases
restored. Looking forward to hearing your views.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF