Release schedules

[Jerry McAllister]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 12:59:24PM +0200, Jonathan McKeown wrote:

> I've been biting my tongue about this because I'm not sure that I can offer 
> any help or useful suggestions, but here goes...
> 
> What on earth is going on with release scheduling?
> 
> FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE, according to the scheduling page at www.freebsd.org, 
> should have had a Release Candidate published two months ago, on 13 
> September. Instead we're still on a Beta - BETA-2, which isn't mentioned in 
> the original schedule. The todo list which has appeared on the website in 
> previous releases isn't available this time, so I can't even get a feel for 
> the likely cause of the holdup.
> 
> As I said, I hate to stand on the sidelines and heckle when I'm not doing 
> anything to contribute to the release, but the timetable has slipped badly 
> and I don't feel I can find information about the reasons or the revised 
> timings. What exactly is going on, and is there anything a busy sysadmin, 
> poor in time, bandwidth and C skills, can do to help with either the release 
> itself or the apparent scheduling/communication issues?
> 
> (I've sent this to -questions rather than -stable because it seems to be an 
> ongoing problem with the timetabling of releases.)

Those dates are guesses at best and should be taken as such.
People crabbing about missing those dates has resulted in not
posting any dates at times in the past.   I would rather have
a fair guess than no information at all.    It would be OK if
Release Engineering would occasionally update their guesses as
they get more information.    But, they tend to be quite busy
just getting all the things needed to do the release taken care 
of so I imagine they don't even think about it.

Probably at this time of final builds and running test suites,
people are busy cleaning up last things that didn't play well
together - modifications that may have banged heads or that
required another thing to be updated.

Ports have to be built against the release candidate too and that
can reveal some things that need to be fixed at the last minute.

Undoubtably, some conflicts have been discovered as final builds
are being made that have to be addresses before a release is
considered clean and finally ready to be released.

If you have the resources to install and run the betas and give them
a good beating and then carefully report any anomalies and conflicts
you find, that might help.   Generally, more detail in the reports
is better than less detail.

I would like to see the release schedules updated more and I would
guess that others would too.   But, there is only so much you can
expect out of volunteers already robbing time from their paying jobs.

////jerry


> 
> Jonathan
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