Million Dollar Question: 218?

[Vlad Dascalu]

Hi Jake,

Jake wrote:

> I just saw a comment on a bug that the 2.20 branch should be happening 
> sometime in the next week or two. That immediately brought the 
> following question to mind: Are we going really that close to release 
> for 2.18? I certainly hope that we aren't actually going to be 
> branching for 2.20 before we ship 2.18. Personally, I don't even like 
> being feature frozen already, but I digress.

Ideally 2.18 should be shipped within the next week or two.

The feature frozen thing is required in order to have timely releases. 
We established (I think while you were away) that we will have a release 
every 6 months. Well, more exactly, a feature freeze every 6 months. 
It's difficult to make this transition (from a 2 years release to a 6 
months release), especially since nobody took the time to do QA on the 
2.17 devel tree. That's why we've had so many 2.18 blockers, and that's 
why we are for 9 months in a blocker freeze (that, together with the 
lack of reviewers).

> From my standpoint, a branch for 2.20 before 2.18 is released would 
> not be a good idea. The docs team already has to maintain 3 separate 
> branches of docs (granted, 2.16's updates are fairly minimal and the 
> 2.18 branch/tip are so similar that normally what works in one works 
> in the other, but still :) ). Adding yet another branch to the mix 
> before it's necessary would make the job that much harder.
> What I'd really like to see happen probably won't. I'd like to see 
> 2.19 reopened to features (maybe not huge/major features) and kept 
> that way until 2.16 support officially expires. This would probably 
> entail a couple more development releases.

We did this on purpose. David said corporate guys need some time 'till 
to upgrade to newer stable versions. I think David choosed this 
support-a-lot-of-branches model just to make it easy for corporations to 
use Bugzilla with the desired stability, or for crazy software devels to 
use it with the latest available features :-)

All those problems will go away once we do the expected QA via the 
release blockers. Since each release will have shorter devel time, there 
will be a smaller number of blockers for each release. That, together 
with Dave's plans to get decent QA back into action, can only account 
for good things in the future (at least things going in the right 
direction? :) ).

> I'd also like to see 2.18 out for more than a week before we release 
> 2.20 :).

That will certainly happen. :-)

Vlad.