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

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik Sun COM>]

On 24 Apr 2002, Luis Villa wrote:

> 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.
> 

Well, by handing out dates by which things will happen, and mentioning
company names you already introduce inherent bias. This doesn't magicly go
away by saying "hey, i'm just a freelance int his mail". You are also
handing out an implcit "we will keep up with the bug rate" certificate,
and that may or may not be true.

> 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. 
> 

Possibly - but they should have sufficent information for that decision,
not merely "there is a deadline here sun wants lots of bugs fixed". I
cannot give that information (all the pages read "proprietary. internal
use only"), and even if i could, it would only be an indication of
towards what people will be working, not a guarantee that that set of
things will get done.

> 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*. 
> 

"Any release gnome will ever put together will not be good enough for a
vendor to just ship" - appeared to be the consensus on GUADEC. It could
have been the people present had special high quality requirements in mind
(or didn't speak up), but the highest figure I heard was "95% there". Some
would call this the "code vs product" distinction.

> <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>
> 

A vendor will never ship what it gets - it will always throw its QA at the
problem, packport a couple of bugs that got fixed just after the release
and so on. This will be always true, no matter how hard you work or
how long you delay.

> 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.
> 
> Luis
> 

	Sander

	I see a dark sail on the horizon
	Set under a dark cloud that hides the sun
	Bring me my Broadsword and clear understanding