On 01/11/2012 03:34 AM, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
Hi -
I had some thoughts and a suggestion this morning about the monthly release cycle that I'd like to share. Perhaps I'll get booed off the stage, perhaps not. I'm sure it can be improved on.
There is a great deal of stress around what blueprints fit into what monthly release boundary. For deliveries like the LEB that combine the fruits of our Linaro labors this makes great sense.
Outside of the process for LEB creation and release, I'd like to suggest it's less than efficient and creates a bit of stress as we have the monthly rush to make the release dates. PMs and TLs continually have to be watching for what will and what won't be making dates that fit with the LEB. This passes on the stress to the engineering team, causes some late night hack-a-thons which in turn I believe caused us to rush software what was less than ready to be included in a LEB. I'm sure we all have examples we could point to.
It seems there's some confusion here. The WGs/LTs deliveries aren't tight to LEB monthly releases, you have your own goals. It's fine to skip a monthly release (like many have done) or provide a snapshot of your current work (like LTs have done).
I think there is confusion inside Linaro about what these releases are. What you're saying is correct, but it doesn't always reflect what's happening on the ground.
For LT the 'beat' we work to is kernel cycle and as you say monthly release is something downstream of what we are anyway doing for us, it should just be a staging post for what popped out of our sausage machine recently.
However people responsible for making the releases feel under pressure to maximize what's in there for a deadline that's not inherently meaningful, when at times when we may be dedicated to having to do something else do to lack of sync with our underlying 'beat'. At its worst, the drama of having a release leads to a false sense of urgency and bad decisions that are not in Linaro's overall interest.
However outside of that process, for the WGs and such, we should go to a process based on continuous integration.
All the chain should be based on continuous integration, including our builds. That's the goal we're aiming and working on.
I completely agree about CI approach will lead to best results in medium and long term and we should be all about that, not wasting time polishing the coprolite of old releases - especially someone else's old releases.
-Andy