[Pkg-xfce-devel] Xfce plans for the lenny cycle

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 10:40:34AM +0100, Simon Huggins wrote:
> Also, padding is extremely frustrating.  The 4 month wait from December
> to April effectively froze uploads from October/November[0] until April
> which seemed a little too long.  If developers believe that you're
> releasing in say October then we'll be more careful about uploads a
> long time before the freeze but if we believe you're saying you're going
> to release in October but really will slip by 4 months then we (and
> presumably other developers) won't bother and your job becomes harder.

And IMHO an appropriate response from the release team to such acts on the
part of maintainers would be to kick the affected packages clean out of the
release with no option of being readmitted.

Timeline gaming and other selfish behaviors on the part of individual
maintainers are a huge reason why Debian has a history of missing its
release targets by such a wide margin[0].  If you care about timely releases
and minimizing the out-of-dateness of software at the time of release, the
responsible thing to do is to be /less/ selfish in response to schedules
proposed by the release team, not to try to elbow your way past all other
maintainers for the privilege of being the last uploader of untested
packages to be included in the release.

> If you're going to more closely manage the next release (and this does
> seem to be the message you're giving out so far) please, please, please
> pick a firm date, tell everyone you're really serious about it and
> somehow communicate that you really mean it to the rest of the project.

The release team is a handful of developers who have finite time available
between them to deal with all the release blockers that present themselves.
IMO, anyone who doesn't help the release team meet those goals by working on
release blockers in packages other than their own shouldn't have their
opinions about schedule slippage weighted very heavily.

And, oh yeah, "we really mean that we want to release on date <X>" has no
more power to compel maintainers to get their packages into a releasable
shape than any other stick.  The only marginally effective stick the release
team has is to kick a package out of the release, and there are plenty of
packages where that stick simply cannot (or will not) be used.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon at debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/

[0] And no, I don't mean etch here, which in spite of the slippage has
apparently had the shortest full freeze this century