Re: What are the community's goals for 2.0? [was Re: Getting serious about releasing]

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Wed, 2002-04-24 at 13:21, Sander Vesik wrote:
> >    That block people from doing the final stabiliziation for a vendor
> >    release until the upstream has said "this is it."
> > 
> >    I don't think it's reasonable for Ximian/Sun to say "we will guarantee
> >    that GNOME-2.0 is out by July". But once GNOME-2.0 is out, it's
> >    much more reasonable to say "we will have a GNOME-2.0 based product
> >    we feel comfortable shipping by July."
> > 
> 
> While I don't speak for Sun, I don't think Sun would say "we will
> quarantee that GNOME-2.0 is out by July", and seeing Luis send out a
> message from which such could be implied was quite suprising to me. 

My apologies; I thought it made it quite clear that this was a personal
email, and apparently I did not. Again, apologies if I made this
unclear- this is /definitely/ all with my 'community QA person' hat on
and not a Ximian or Sun hat on.

That said- Sun has committed a huge amount of manpower between now and
that date, the vast majority of which will be directed towards fixes
that will immediately impact the community's codebase. I don't think it
is unreasonable for the /community/ to wait for that work to be
completed and take advantage of it for the community release. 

To put it another way: I don't personally believe that the 2.0.0 release
that Havoc outlined will be good enough for any vendor to ship*. 

<b>If it isn't good enough for any vendor to ship, is it good enough for
the community to ship? Or should the community have high/higher
standards?</b>

I don't know the answer to that question, but it seems to be crucial,
and the community has to decide on it. I /personally/ feel that if it
isn't good enough for vendors it shouldn't be good enough for the
community, but people have cited legitimate concerns in this thread
about why maybe that shouldn't be the case. 

*This is based on my assessment of the quality of the codebase and the
observed waiting periods of vendors in the past, /not/ inside knowledge
of the distros' or Ximian's plans.

> So no, we aren't guaranteeing a quality release in july, we aren't
> highjacking the release to our own purposes and we aren't doing any other
> unreasonable things either.

I hope no one drew that inference! Sun (and I say this very strictly as
a community member) has been a role model for vendor-community
interaction with their GNOME2.0 work, and has never pushed the community
or the release team about dates. Advised and consulted (as Havoc and I
are doing right now) definitely, but not exerted any undue pressure.

Luis