Release wranglers call today (Wednesday) -- 6.8 postpartum discussion

[Kevin E Martin]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 12:46:51PM -0700, Torrey Lyons wrote:
> Had the BoD announced a tentative late-August release back in 
> late-May when discussions began, I believe the situation would have 
> been far different.

I think this is the key, and why I started the scheduling section the
way that I did.  The request was made multiple times to the release
wranglers at the weekly (Friday) meetings, but no one acted until the
members (who were at that time mainly also the BOD members) returned
from summer conference travels.  It might be that this summer was an
abberation, but there was nearly a conference every week or two.

>                     Since most of the members were not party to the 
> discussions, I don't know if the late August release was an 11th hour 
> request or if it was always roughly intended and just not 
> communicated.

It wasn't an 11th hour request.  I don't recall if it was communicated
to the release wranglers mailing list or not, but I definitely brought
it up on the release wranglers phone meetings starting in late May.

>               In either case, the take home message is that 
> developers need to be informed of the release schedule early enough 
> in the release cycle so that they can adjust their activities 
> appropriately.

100% agree and it was discussed on today's call.  What I'm hoping to
come out of this particular discussion is a process for scheduling
releases that is clearly spelled out and everyone understands.  There
are many options as to how to do that.  Some were discussed on the call
today.  The minutes from today's call are being prepared and should be
ready soon.  Perhaps we can start from there.

Also, I should re-emphasis that the writeup is meant to summarize what
happened and provoke discussion.  There were many issues that came up
during the release with scheduling being just one of them.  Some were
handled better than others.  Overall, I feel that the release was
successful, mainly due to the hard work of all invovled (developers,
release wranglers, X.Org, etc.).  Now that the 6.8 release is over,
let's figure out what worked and what didn't, and try to improve the
process so that the next release is even better.