Regarding inclusion of the Get (Internet Archive) Books Activity - while the goals of including this Activity are admirable, it simply isn't going to happen for v.3.0 due to the timing of deadlines beyond our control. Let's take a look at why, and see what we can learn from this in terms of process improvement for next time.
SoaS is a Fedora spin, which means we are tied to Fedora's release schedule (in exchange for being able to use their infrastructure, which dramatically improves the sustainability of the engineering workload). For the upcoming (Mirabelle v.3.0) release, the schedule in question is at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/13/Schedule. You'll note that Final Freeze (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/13/Schedule) is today, May 4th, 2010, and that this freeze means that "no changes are allowed to any packages." Activities in SoaS are shipped as packages, which means that the version of the Get Books Activity in the Fedora repositories as of approximately 3.5 hours from now (midnight EDT) would be the final version of that Activity we shipped with this release. The most recent development version of the Get Books Activity is v5, from December 9 of 2009. (http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/get-internet-archive-books) This is already a long time without an update. The version packaged in Fedora is even older - v3 from November 20, 2009 (http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=9544). We don't know how well the 11/20 version works, and 3 hours is simply not enough time to update the package to the 12/9 version (and we don't know how well that works either, nor do we have sufficient time to find out). This is also not the activity author's fault, but simply a matter of fact caused by a lack of capacity to help keep these packages up to date in Fedora. We'd love help with this for the next release, and it's something we'd like to discuss during our v.3.0 reflection discussion (more on this coming soon - we're thinking of doing this on IRC on June 1st, well after the release has shipped and the initial wave of downloads has died down). But right now, time is tight, and the fact of the matter is that we simply don't have time to make this update. So we're already stuck with an out-of-date Activity with untested code of unknown status if we choose to ship the code at all. That choice - to ship or not to ship - must also be made within the next 3 hours. This is because the freeze also applies to the kickstart files that control the list of Activities included in v.3.0 Mirabelle by default. This means that after midnight EDT, we would not be able to change our minds about removing an Activity from the build that ships - if we were later to find a bug in the Activity, we're stuck with that bug in the release for 6 months. If, within the next 3 hours, someone can repackage and thoroughly test (in a publicly documented fashion) Get (Internet Archive) Books and find Peter or Sebastian - who have been up late working on this for the past few nights (it's 2:30AM for them right now as I write this, and I'm hoping they're both asleep) to take the risk of updating the kickstart file to include the Activity, then the Activity will ship. If not, then we simply can't do it. Again, this is the case for v.3.0 Mirabelle - but it does not have to be the case for the next version, which will come out in 6 months, again following the Fedora release cycle. It's the first time we've released SoaS as a Fedora Spin, and while this has been overall a positive thing in terms of reliability of the product and sustainability of the workload, there are certainly things we could have (on all sides) done better with this process and the communications around it. We'd like to invite everyone to join us to take a long, hard look at how we can do better for v.4.0 - and perhaps we'll start by seeing how we can avoid this situation next time by making sure it's clear what people need to do in order to see Activities they care about ship in SoaS. I know people may be disappointed by the situation, but this is the situation that we have, and we can work together to make sure that nobody is going to be surprised next time. Questions? Comments? Please let me know - I'll be up and intermittently working on SoaS stuff 'till midnight EDT when the freeze hits, though I'm going to get some dinner first. --Mel (mchua on IRC) _______________________________________________ SoaS mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas
