Release schedule plans

[Vlad Dascalu]

Gervase Markham wrote:

> This has really gone beyond my personal opinion. I really don't think 
> telling the project maintainer that: "You no longer have the discretion
> needed in order to take decisions on a case by case basis" could be 
> considered as anything but rude.

But, once you leave the emotional part of your statement out of it, it's 
becoming true, isn't it? :-)

Every rule that we give as a rule is that: a rule. That restricts your 
liberty of decision and your discretion. Take for example the fact that 
we said to do freezes on a regular scheduled. It has its advantages and 
its disadvantages. We pushed that as a rule, so now we have less 
flexibility in changing it. If instead we would have pushed that as a 
guideline, probably we would be more light-hearted nowadays to go on a 
9-month freeze, aka to break our promise, because at that time it 
wouldn't have been a rule, but a simple guideline.

When evaluating rudeness it's really only a personal opinion, because 
there are no general accepted criterias for classifying things as rude 
or not. Only general guidelines :-) that vary from culture to culture. 
So what might be rude for you might be a bless (literally :-) ) for 
another one. I don't object to hints on PRIVATE email about things that 
I said about YOU that you might consider rude. But I do thing that 
steering a what wants to be a PUBLIC rational discussion with your 
personal opinions about what is rude or not in regard to ANOTHER person 
is a little worrying.

David has a mouth of himself and like we've seen he can stand pretty 
good on his own. He will even repeat your words if you say them before 
he goes to say them, so I wouldn't be worried about that too much to 
such a degree that I'd steer the discussion on emotionale issues.

More, what you said about "working together" seemed like the mit of 
"people have to like each other, be buds/friends/blood brothers in order 
to work together", a nit that appeared on my evaluation as a harming 
thing to the Bugzilla development. If you believe that working together 
depends on us liking each other, then that's an issue in the development 
process and it will have to be discussed further when we reopen the 
evaluation process (right after the 2.18 shipment).

> But I finally realised that people just can't do that.

That's a general statement. :-) People can try, and that is what should 
everybody should do. If you want to write my email to me "now", please 
do it in private without steering the discussion towards emotional 
issues. Even if people can't keep only the rationale part of it, they 
can follow the simple rule of trying to reply to rationale things on the 
public list and to the emotional stuff on private emails. At least I'm 
sure you can try.

> I think that if you do that until we release 2.18, it will be *more* 
> productive for Bugzilla development - both because we'll release 2.18 
> faster, and because your good suggestions will make the releasing of 
> 2.20 and onwards better and faster too.

You asked if I think that this discussion will improve the 3 blockers 
left. As a matter a fact, I do - see 
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=275108#c37. But anyway, I 
don't want to be a "whiner" here, so let's take it another way. You see 
nowadays David discussing about 2.20 and future roadmap plans. If your 
theory is correct, this discussion about the roadmap and he future 
wouldn't help the 3 blockers left. But yet, he does it. For a very good 
reason - 2.18 will go out hand in hand with 2.19.2 or 2.20rc1, and with 
the status update it will be nice to let folks know about the future. 
2.18 goes hand in hand with a lot of community-related documents; policy 
and general discussion like justdave's roadmap&future thing or my 
evaluation thing goes hand in hand with those. You can't really separate 
them; you could strictly resolve those 3 bugs and ignore everything 
else, but that would mean missing a lot of things, code driving-related 
included.

Vlad.