Releases in 3 months

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, July 15, 2013 14:16:01 Luca Beltrame wrote:
> Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > "we should try to recruit more people from the  user community of
> > downstream distributions who have the skills necessary to merge patches
> > and test. some distributions do this already.”
> 
> The reason I mentioned "issues" with this approach originally originate from
> (perhaps it's just my naive thinking) the need to prevent burnout at all
> costs in distro teams.

i think you may be misunderstanding me here.

i’m not suggeting putting more burdon on existing packagers, but looking for 
*new* contributors amongst the current *user base* of existing distributions. 
these *new* contributors would help with patch backporting and work on 
maintenance releases.

fully spelled out it would require a few things:

* developers use commit log tags like BUG: religiously
* provide an easy (or at least well documented) way for people to track these 
commits. when i wrote “kernel cousin kde” waaaaaay back i used some perl 
software written specifically for trolling through emails looking for such 
things.
* documenting a workflow in which people would track the BUG: commits, apply 
them to a different stable branch, build and test and possibly push as a 
backport.

perhaps it’s too much work to set up, though such a thing would be fantastic 
to see imho.

in any case, when i said “try to recruit more people from the user community” 
i meant that .. not “let’s throw more on packagers"

> > The question is whether the above is a reason to not have 3 month release
> > cycles? (Or whatever # of months is agreed on, where that # is less than
> > 6)
> 
> It is a matter of workflow, I think, that is that the development workflow
> (let's call it like that, even if it is improper) should be put in place
> first, and then applied to shrink release times.

yes, i agree with this; i wrote in my first email on the topic that i’d like to 
see branch management workflows clearly laid out and any missing tools for 
working with topic branches introduced.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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