On Mon, 2009-06-08 at 12:24 -0500, Jeremy C. Reed wrote: > - what has the elected board discussed for improving or changing the > release engineering processes and scheduling?
Just to address this one point, recall that the Board is explicitly not a technical body. It exists to govern the organization, not the code. Now, with my board hat off. De facto technical governance has been somewhere between meritocracy, junta and hazing ritual since approximately the 4.4/6.7 split. The release engineering goals have been fairly loose guidelines rather than strict policy. We could certainly use more rigor, but I suspect that's more about people actually getting off their butts and doing the work than about writing it down. I mean, we say we do katamari releases every six months, but we clearly don't; writing it down and underlining it strenuously isn't going to make it suddenly better. So instead we have a moderately demand-driven release model that happens to trigger the guilt reflex after about nine months. Individual components sync up with whatever server they think is convenient, but practically speaking there's only like five of those, and they're pretty much always buildable against at least the most recent server release and git master. The server goes to ridiculous effort to avoid breaking ABI and bumps a major number internally when it does. The library interfaces never break, ever, with minor exceptions for non-app-facing libraries like libXfont that really deserve to die painfully. Testing is... informal is the polite word. Nobody's stepped up to do it rigorously, so no one does it. Security is handled out of band like any other project. We'll release patches for at least the most recent release, probably do a point release for same, and anyone shipping anything older gets to backport. The actual server release is typically a two or three month cycle of the release engineer branching, cherry-picking fixes from master while skipping nonsense, and either cajoling other people into fixing showstoppers or (more realistically, although unfortunately) superheroing it themselves. Eventually they get sick of it and call it 1.7.0. Then people actually test and you do a 1.7.1 a month later. - ajax
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