[Mageia-marketing] Alpha release

[Romain d'Alverny]

Hi there,

this thread, to discuss Mageia first alpha release communication plan
(that's not a huge thing, but it's important).

The alpha is expected before the end of January, although we are a bit
short; while we don't have an excellent progress reporting discipline
yet, you can see bits of it here: http://pkgsubmit.mageia.org/ ; the
process at hand here is to bootstrap the distribution, that is,
package and build all required software to have a minimal running
system that, in turn, will allow to build a working set of packages to
get to the ISO (that, in itself, would be a great topic to post; any
volunteer?).

However, packaging is not all, it has to produce a somewhat working
ISO; we need too to finish to cleanup critical packages from
references to Mandriva-owned, unlicensed artwork. Among other things.

So although that's not desirable, we may slip out of the intended
date; it's not a deadly sin, however we already slipped from past
December to this January.

Anyway. This alpha release is:
 * our first technical alpha ISO, demonstrating our buildsystem and
packaging team readiness;
 * intended to developers, packagers, testers and contributors;
 * to be expected to be ugly, have non-functioning or broken parts;
 * our first milestone with a clean package tree.

It is NOT:
 * for use;
 * for evaluation outside of a technical, contributor point of view;
 * in a final, working state;
 * for end-user review.

Provided that there are great expectations on our project, it may be
good to have a very explicit name for the release; not only "Mageia
Alpha 1" but maybe something more along the "Mageia Alpha 1 -
developers preview" or "developers release" or something else.

So it may be a great occasion to (re)present the project, technical
parts of it on one side and governance/org parts on the other side.
But the focus is really to push the right message for the ISO.

What to expect next to this alpha? We have this rough list of specs:
http://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=iso_0_specifications but we need to
sort it out better (per milestone) and make it more clear what each
step has. We'll discuss of this too during coming Monday Council
meeting, so if a few of the team could attend it or at least have a
look on the notes, that would be great.

Cheers,

Romain