[Mageia-dev] Summary of the release cycle decision

[Michael scherer]

Hi

So after reading all the feedback on the topic of release, here
are the conclusion of the discussion made by Anne and me :


- some people have expressed some concern about the fixed nature of the time based release.
While it was obvious, we do not plan to release with serious bug, especially if they cannot be
corrected after the release. And the whole question is to decide what is serious or not. I guess we can 
do some more formal review of bugs in the release period.

- despites trying to focus the discussion about the release cycle, the topic of the
support was touched. However, without more data, we couldn't evaluate much the requirement
in term of ressources. 
Yet, several people proposed to follow the ubuntu model with LTS, or the suse one
with evergreen. As said before, this topic will be discussed soon ( likely once the backports one
are finished ), and we hope to be able to have more information since official support 
was started. While the proposal is not even started, I guess it would be in the form of 
having 1 distribution support for a longer time every X release, 
and to try to take this in account for the features and softwares selected.

- several persons on forum have also expressed the need for having a rock 
solid release, which "simply" translate to have enough test and bugfixes. Yet, this 
conflict with what some others persons wanted, ie newer softwares ( which by definition are 
less tested, and so may be more subject to bugs ). How to solve
the dilemna is yet to be found, even if we have started with the current backport discussion.
The previous point about support could be also relevant to such issues, and we will take this in account.

- and to finish, after reading everything the consensus seemed to be around having 9 months 
for developpement was enough for a majority of people.

Since we took one month for various things ( such as discussing everything ), we propose
the next release to be on 4th april, and start the cycle today. This is in the middle
of the week on purpose, to avoid the weekend.

There is no exact planning yet ( so do not ask for now ), but it will be sent for next 
week ( if everything goes well ). Once the planning is decided, a proper announce ( blog, forums,
etc ) should be done.

-- 
Michael Scherer