7.7 katamari release manager

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 12/21/10 12:48 PM, Matt Dew wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Jeremy Huddleston <jeremyhu at apple.com> wrote:
>> Thanks for all the effort Alan.  That's a huge list of modules to push out.
>>
> Indeed, and all the cleanup you've done on the docs on top of that.
> Many thanks on everything.

Thanks - but just to be clear, the katamari release manager doesn't always have
to push out that many modules - the 7.5 katamari was the first time many modules
were released since 7.1, like the fonts.   The configure & docs cleanups though
rippled across many modules and 7.6 thus saw another large set of releases.

I point this out, because I don't think I'll be able to do that for 7.7 next
year, as much fun as doing it two years in a row has been.   Ideally the 7.7
release would come shortly after the xserver 1.11 release - if we keep to our
recent approximate schedules, that would be xserver in August, katamari in
September.   Thankfully for my sake, there are no penalties for slipping beyond
the stream of occasional jabs from phoronix, which at least reminds you people
do care about it.

That time frame though, I should be thoroughly occupied in finishing off the
Solaris 11 release, which we've announced is planned for the second half of
2011, so my time will be limited, and someone else will need to step up.

I strongly encourage whoever volunteers to do a better job of delegation &
team building than I did - while there was lots of help from all around, I
did far more of the module releasing than I should have.   There are a lot
more people with the necessary access to the git repositories and fd.o
release directories who can be helping doing these releases.   Of course,
I'll help out with the katamari, and still keep doing module releases in
between katamaris, as that's useful to me in building packages for the distro
I'm paid to work on, but others should feel free to pitch in more often as well.

Fortunately, Matt's work on the docs made that much easier this year - I just
had to wrangle xmlto & fop, instead of those plus groff plus tex plus ...
I'm hoping his plans around documentation make things even easier next year,
so that manually editing the doc/index.html is no longer needed (and I should
probably tell him & Gaetan all the things I had to modify in the docs I posted
to the website from what comes out of the build process, since we could probably
make a lot of it happen more automatically).

Also, compared to the previous katamaris I was involved with, both 7.5 & 7.6
had one huge sanity-saving feature - excellent, dedicated, and most importantly,
separate, X server release managers.   Thanks are especially due to Keith,
Peter, & Jeremy, for making the xserver portion of the katamari a simple task
of seeing which stable release they'd done last and not having to deal with
pushing that out as well.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System