Future release process (was: [Squeakfoundation]3.5 release timing)

[goran.hultgren at bluefish.se]

Hi all!

Daniel Vainsencher <danielv at netvision.net.il> wrote:
[SNIP]
> I think we can speed up harvesting in a simple way. Specify these
> "goodness criteria"-
> - Has gone through indepedent review
> - Has been independently tested
> - Has been passed through SLint, with every finding inspected (and the
> relevant ones fixed)
> - Has a detailed documentation of the rationale for every change
> - Is small (<10k)
> These aren't absolute requirements. Instead, they determine priority.
> The more of these properties you fix has, the sooner it'll happen. We
> can do this by simply sorting the list accordingly.
> 
> Then, if people care about a specific fix, they'll review it, test it,
> SLint it, document it, and make sure it is in small pieces. That will
> surely improve speed up the bottleneck process of evaluation. Fixes that
> don't recieve this attention, might not (yet) deserve ours.

Yes, I like this approach. This is something we really should have in
the new harvesting tool.
A list of checkboxes that the tool can use to "grade" changes so that we
can concentrate on the important ones.

At the same time harvesting will hopefully turn into something much more
pleasureable when we start dishing out "stewardships" to people. A
Steward will have much more motivation to harvest for his/her package.

Yadda, yadda... :-)

There are so many thoughts in my head right now but some random ones
are:

1. We really NEED to start dishing out responsibility. In many ways, not
only Stewardships for packages - even though that may be the most
important one. All these discussions about how the release cycle should
work is showing us - even though the discussions are good - at some time
in the near future we might need to simply point at someone and say "Ok,
Daniel - you seem to have the clearest grip here, you decide - because
there are so many thoughts here that we simple cant argue ourselves into
agreement.". Or someone else of course.

2. We really need IMHO to get some clear decision on the "package
grouping" issue. This will affect everything else - release cycle, what
to do in 3.5, stewardships etc. etc.

Ok, to get some more rigour here in all these discussions I would like
to appoint Daniel as a temporary "chairman" for these particular
discussions. Daniel, are you ok with this? Simply someone that says "Ok,
now we have reviewed all the arguments and I decide that we go thatta
way.".

Being the guide of "image detanglement" you really are already in the
middle of these discussions. Doug could of course do this too - you both
are IMHO both very good at these kind of discussions and making us move
into some form of decision. Anyway, you decide guys. ;-)

(Currently I just don't have the time to pick up that particular club,
but I am trying to follow)

regards, Göran

PS. Yes, I know this isn't crossposted on squeak-dev but so? :-)