Proposal: 3.10 RFRG

(Request For Release Guru, that is ;-)).

I've been thinking. After some alkaselzer got rid of the headache this
to me unusual act caused, shouldn't we have some sort of simple round
of ideas where people can propose "I'll pull 3.10 and do it in such
and such a way". Or 4.0, or whatever.

For example, I would say: I'll pull 3.10 and will do it as follows:
- 3.10 will be a maintenance release in the 3.x series - the goal is
to have no incompatible surprises against 3.9 on the language/vm
level;
- 3.10 will be released on April 1st (6 months away. Ok, April 2nd ;-));
- The full image will comprise any package in 3.9 that a) runs all its
unit tests, b) comes from an MC repository, c) has a maintainer
(person or group) and d) is automatically loadable and unloadable.
Additional packages may be added at my discretion;
- The base image will be a minimal subset of the full image;
- I will unilaterally add stuff to MC to facilitate the process
(pre/postscripts, etcetera) if necessary;
- I will provide a daily build for upstream maintainers to test their
packages against.
- I will not touch, not even with a very long stick, any upstream
code. Code integrates or not, code that doesn't integrate is out. If
that means that 3.10 doesn't have Morphic and MVC and whatnot, so be
it.

A couple of these proposals could float around, the community could
debate them and when one of the proposals has the least offending
terms ;-), the community could accept them and name a release guru.

Advantages:
- It is reasonably clear to the community what they'll get;
- The release guru wannabe's can name their own terms, so they will do
just the amount of work they are prepared to do and nothing more. In
the example above, I would not do a lot of work :-)

On 8/20/06, Cees De Groot <[hidden email]> wrote:
>  shouldn't we have some sort of simple round
> of ideas where people can propose "I'll pull 3.10 and do it in such
> and such a way". Or 4.0, or whatever.

This is an excellent idea!  There shoudl be a round of proposals with
discussion on the proposals, followed by a vote.  Someone needs to be
in charge of the process.  So, perhaps a month before the current
release is finished, this person would call for proposals and oversee
the vote.   The board should probably do this.

What about bug fixes to the base image?  These don't seem to be
covered by this proposal.

Also, I think six months is too long.  My guess is that there will be
both revolutionary and non-revolutionary proposals.  The
revolutionaries will use this date as a deadline to get a
demonstration of their system ready and it is better to have those
dates more than twice a year.  Jan 2 would be a better date.

-Ralph

On 8/20/06, Ralph Johnson <[hidden email]> wrote:
> What about bug fixes to the base image?  These don't seem to be
> covered by this proposal.
>
Well, with everything packaged up and stuff - someone else would have
to take care of that :-).

> Also, I think six months is too long.

That's my proposal, mind you - everyone would be free to come up with
different periods (or even sign up for 3.10 and 3.11, ... in one go
promising a release every quarter, whatever).

Am 20.08.2006 um 13:16 schrieb Cees De Groot:

Sounds good.

However, can we really expect to find several proposers that we trust  
to pull it off? In the past we were lucky to even find one (3.7 -  
Doug, 3.8 - Michael, 3.9 - Stef+Marcus). And it always was more work  
and took longer than anticipated.

Anyway, I don't want to sound to pessimistic - so keep the proposals  
coming ;-)

Should there be a separate vote in the community, or should the Board  
appoint an RG after hearing the discussion?

- Bert -

On Sun, 20 Aug 2006 14:24:10 +0200, Ralph Johnson wrote:
...
> What about bug fixes to the base image?  These don't seem to be
> covered by this proposal.

Not a big surprise, the word quality appears just 1,170 times when  
googeling squeak-dev

-  
http://www.google.com/search?q=quality+site:lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev

This figure is, according to the "Message History" section of

- http://groups.yahoo.com/group/squeak/

just the average traffic of one of the ca. 90 Squeak months...

/Klaus

> -Ralph
>
>

> From: Bert Freudenberg
> However, can we really expect to find several proposers that we trust
> to pull it off? In the past we were lucky to even find one (3.7 -
> Doug, 3.8 - Michael, 3.9 - Stef+Marcus). And it always was more work
> and took longer than anticipated.

The process may be simpler if the candidate release guru can state their
own terms - it is possible to trade off trust, ambition, experience,
scope and so on.  For example, if someone stated that their goal for the
next release was to build a complete, coherent multimedia framework and
integrate it into the base image across all platforms, I'd regard it as
worthy of praise but not of my realistic support :-).  Whereas Cees'
proposal seems modest enough that it might actually happen if we chose
to appoint him as the Guru.

                - Peter

On 8/20/06, Peter Crowther <[hidden email]> wrote:
> The process may be simpler if the candidate release guru can state their
> own terms - it is possible to trade off trust, ambition, experience,
> scope and so on.
>
Nail on the head, Peter. Thanks for the example :)

Cees De Groot puso en su mail :

You have my vote after some more explanation of what means 3.10 doesn't have
Morphic.
And I ready to follow instructions from you.

Edgar



       
       
               
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