New Bugzilla Roadmap

[David Miller]

Stuart Donaldson wrote on 1/27/06 1:05 AM:

>  The slip should not need to accumulate resulting in a 4 week open
> period.  Give yourself 8 or 12 weeks if you think that would give enough
> time to land some bigger things, then stabilize them.

But that's 4 weeks instead of 5 months.  It's a huge difference.  At
this point I'd rather do the 7 months instead of 5.  (though maybe if
we're doing good, we can do a release in the summer instead of waiting
until fall, that's not too bad of an idea -- we'll see where we're at
closer to summer).

> Actually, that reminds me.  Why does the trunk freeze during all the
> rc's?  why not at the first rc, create a support branch for bug fixes,
> and then let the development continue on the trunk?

That's exactly what we are doing.  We haven't shipped an RC yet.  As
soon as the first RC ships, we branch and the trunk is open.

> Is it that you are
> trying to force people to work with the rc in order to ring it out, and
> you want to encourage people that might be interested in the new stuff
> to ring out the old first?

We freeze the trunk when we hit the scheduled date.  At that point, any
items which would be considered poor enough state to block the release
are flagged.  All of those items need to be fixed before we have a
release candidate (because the candidate should be good enough state to
release, in theory).

And yes, the reason is to encourage people to work on fixing the release
blockers instead of working on new features.  And it works.  And we've
had major problems trying to get blockers fixed in the past when we
haven't enforced a freeze.  It's a volunteer labor force.  We can't
force anyone to work on anything.  And nobody likes to work on blockers.
 So the only motivation that seems to work is "you can't check in your
new feature until the blockers are fixed."  Eventually people get tired
of waiting to check in and start helping to fix the blockers.

-- 
Dave Miller                                   http://www.justdave.net/
System Administrator, Mozilla Corporation      http://www.mozilla.com/
Project Leader, Bugzilla Bug Tracking System  http://www.bugzilla.org/