[gentoo-dev] What are Gentoo releases?

[gentoo-dev] What are Gentoo releases?

[Grant Goodyear]

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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

----- Forwarded message from Aron Griffis <agriffis@gentoo.org> -----

From: Aron Griffis <agriffis@gentoo.org>
Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 14:48:25 -0400
To: gentoo-releng@lists.gentoo.org
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6i
Subject: Re: [gentoo-releng] Meeting time

Hi Jon,

ZhEN wrote:	[Mon May 10 2004, 10:53:19AM EDT]
> Please find attached the compiled list of features that I fielded
> from -dev, -core, and personal e-mails. 

My perception of the current release process is this: We set a date
for release.  Developers work on features.  Whatever is done in time
for the release is what goes in, the other stuff waits for the next
release.  IMHO, part of the point of doing more frequent releases is
to ease pressure from developers; if we can't finish a given feature,
then we know there will be another release in 3 months, so it's okay.

So I don't understand this list of potential features for 2004.2.
Shouldn't this be maintained separately from the release process?  Why
is releng meeting to talk about this list?

Regards,
Aron

--
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer (alpha / baselayout / ia64 / mozilla / mutt / ruby / vim)

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@gentoo.org
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76

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

[Marius Mauch]

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On 05/14/04  Grant Goodyear wrote:

>   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?

I definitely agree with Aron, I don't think a goal-oriented release
process would work very well for us. IMO if we are going that route we
would become a more and more relase-centered distro because everyone has
to complete stuff for the next release.

Marius

-- 
Public Key at http://www.genone.de/info/gpg-key.pub

In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be
Light.' And there was still nothing, but you could see a bit better.

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

[Joshua Brindle]

Not that I'm particularly interested in the release process but I'd just 
like to make the suggestion that -releng take a good look at the freebsd 
release process, they are very much like us in that they have a 
constantly moving ports tree but also have a consistant release 
schedule/process and also have definitive goals with each release. 
Granted there is very different in that they are the actual 
libc/kernel/userland developers so they actively work on that and 
schedule the features around releases.

Also.. since glibc switched to snapshots rather than versioned releases 
something that releng is going to need to do is ensure the the current 
glibc in portage is stabilized and tested thoroughly before stages/grp 
are built, this is a goal that will have to be constantly met before 
release and certainly can't be put off until the next release.

Josuha Brindle

Marius Mauch wrote:
> On 05/14/04  Grant Goodyear wrote:
> 
> 
>>  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?
> 
> 
> I definitely agree with Aron, I don't think a goal-oriented release
> process would work very well for us. IMO if we are going that route we
> would become a more and more relase-centered distro because everyone has
> to complete stuff for the next release.
> 
> Marius
> 


--
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

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

[John Davis]

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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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