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

[Torrey Lyons]

Unfortunately I was not able to attend the phone call because this 
was of particular interest to me. In any case, Kevin's notes did a 
good job of summarizing the chronology and issues. The main thing 
that stood out while reading it and while living through it was that 
the compressed schedule was mentioned more than 10 times. It was a 
factor in almost every problem that was encountered.

When I heard the original schedule in mid-July I thought it was 
wildly optimistic. It is a testament to the hard work and talents of 
the people involved that it slipped in quality and time as little as 
it did.

At 12:08 AM -0400 9/29/04, Kevin E Martin wrote:
>The release was determined to be a
>time based release since it was driven by several companies (most
>notably Red Hat and SUSE) that needed to have a newer X Window System
>release for their upcoming products.

In my opinion the decision to schedule the release as tightly as it 
was based on this driver was seriously flawed. This decision loomed 
over the entire release cycle and had many negative consequences. I 
do not object to the schedules of external interests influencing 
X.org release schedules. However, in this case commercial interests 
dictated a completely unreasonable schedule, which affected the 
quality of the X.org release on every platform. I am perhaps more 
free to criticize because I am not biting the hand that feeds me.

Ideally, what would come out of this would be a consensus on what is 
a reasonable schedule for a release cycle. Any requests for releases 
should then be required to fit within this framework. As an example, 
I would propose that any contemplated release should be publicly 
announced (on this list for example) at least three months before the 
release date with at least a 6 week period before the feature freeze.

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. 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. 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.

--Torrey