On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 02:10:24AM +0100, Maximilian Albert wrote:
I'm probably in a situation similar to Gail's right now.
Unfortunately, it's hard to pick a time for release that is not inconvenient for at least a portion of the project. Since most of the time we allow development to proceed fairly free-form, when we do overlay a schedule, it's inevitable that some projects have to squeeze to fit.
It's hard to say if the time will be sufficient, but would you be willing to wait until the end of next week before announcing Chill? On the other hand, regarding your description ...
- Chill. Development focuses on wrapping up. Identify 'make distcheck' issues Triage bug reports Run an About Screen contest First draft of Release Notes. Update tutorials and other docs
... I'm wondering what precisely "Development focuses on wrapping up" means?
It's worded specifically for projects (presumably like yours and Gail's) that is nearing completion but needs to be given some additional time and got squeezed by the schedule imposition. We allocate some time to allow people to hurry those towards completion, while other developers shift focus to bugs. Of course, we take a risk here in that late development projects will have less QA time, but if we can get the QA work for completed development projects done early, in theory we'll have more QA attention to apply to the late development projects later on.
In any case, the main thing during Chill is that we need to avoid starting *new* projects.
I'm asking because in my case "wrapping up" does involve major changes (code-wise). This would result in one or more large commits. I'd like to know how much I need to hurry up if I want my stuff to hit this release. Thanks, Max
Right, it sounds like your project fits into the "wrapping up" clause. I think the most important thing that "wrapping up" projects should do, is to report status verbosely and frequently. Don't worry about the frequency or size of the commits - what you need to maximize is the *visibility* of what you're doing - especially any changes that you think have risk of adding bugs. Let us know how close you're getting, any blocking issues you run into, and highlight any areas where people could do things to help accelerate your progress.
Thanks, Bryce