Re: [gentoo-dev] What are Gentoo releases?

[John Davis <zhen@gentoo.org>]

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On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 14:01, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> Dear all,
>   I would like to get a discussion rolling about what, exactly,
>   constitutes a Gentoo release, and what we want to accomplish with any
>   given release.  I'm forwarding (with Aron's permission) an e-mail that
>   agriffis sent to -releng describing his view about what our release
>   process currently is.  I believe that this description does describe
>   the current process reasonably well, but perhaps some may disagree.
>   More important, is this process what we _want_ our release process to
>   be?  Gentoo "releases" are different from those of any other
>   distribution, inasmuch as the "version" of Gentoo that a user is
>   running (meaning what collection of packages are on the user's
>   machine) depends on what *hour* Gentoo was installed, so from a
>   technical standpoint the "release" has more to do with the
>   installation medium than anything else.  At the same time, it is
>   important to recognize that releases also serve a public-relations
>   purpose.  Take a look at OpenBSD's recent release,
>   http://www.openbsd.org/35.html.  The "What's New" section of that page
>   is fairly extensive, and distrowatch and other news sites have
>   provided OpenBSD with a fair amount of coverage about their new release.    
>   Even if we maintain a calendar-based release system, should we also
>   be striving to make releases goal-oriented as well?  If so, how do we
>   go about doing so?
> 
> Some thoughts,
> g2boojum
> 

Grant (and all) -
This is one of those questions that we (releng) have been working on as
of late :) At the last releng meeting, we brought this up and had some
pretty decent discussion about it.

Releng came to a consensus of what we believe a Gentoo release is.
Basically, it is not too far from what you are talking about. The way
Gentoo is setup it is pretty natural to release the way that we do.
Since Gentoo users are always up-to-date, they really have no need for
upgrade type installation media. The media that matters to them is
initial install media, such as LiveCDs, stages, and GRP. Building stages
and GRP on a quarterly basis keeps the media up-to-date and users happy.
LiveCDs don't necessarily need to be built quarterly (once we stabilize
them), and that is an option that we are exploring.

Now, where does this leave features? Aron had a good point - why do we
have features for 2004.2? What releng decided is that that releng
features affect releng release media. Looking at the finalized release
feature list for .2 (http://dev.gentoo.org/~zhen/2004.2_request.txt) you
will see that all of the features are media-centric. Releng decided that
it would not be fair for us to dictate deadlines for features to other
projects besides our own. Releng dictating a release deadline to the
Portage team for example would be ridiculous because we are so
unattached from their development process. Portage is an integral part
of Gentoo, but releng really shouldn't have say over how they manage
their own project (and part of management is features). Also, this gives
releng the time and manpower to explore other cool things such as X
LiveCDs, GameCDs, and other neat things (wireless router livecds?).

This doesn't mean that those projects can't coincide their features with
our release schedule. If they want to, that is great because we can use
it as a marketing point :) As long as they can have the feature done on
time for release, I am game, and would be more than happy to give it as
much PR as we can.

So basically, we can synthesize goal oriented releases and time based
releases to fit Gentoo. I don't think that using one or the other
exclusively would really do us much good. Perhaps a good addition would
be a Product Manager, like klieber brought up. This position (which
would not be part of releng but rather above, part of metastructure
perhaps?) could manage non-releng feature coincidence with our release
schedule.

Give releng some time and we will get there. A discussion like this one
is a step in the right direction though :) Thanks for listening ;)

Cheers,
//zhen

BTW - All of this is being presented to managers on Monday ;)

-- 
John Davis
Gentoo Linux Developer
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~zhen>

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