Getting alphas out the door in a sane way
Boris Zbarsky
for about then.
Now maybe it's my fault for not reading the Gecko meeting minutes (apparently
those had the date), but quite honestly I haven't been able to keep track of all
the meetings we have going on given the limited amount of time I can allocate to
Mozilla right now, and I'm sure I'm not the only one in this position.
As a result I checked in some (regression-prone) changes a few days ago that I
would never have checked in this close to an alpha if I'd known about it.
I would like to propose the following procedure for our alpha (and beta, and
final) releases:
1) Once a release freeze data is decided on, announce it. At least in
m.d.planning. This is key.
2) For each such announcement, have a contact address or list of addresses that
will reach the people responsible for deciding whether a bug blocks that
release. Bug owners _only_ should contact that list for bugs they own that
absolutely must block the release (presumably regressions). We need this
because we don't have a good way of tracking bugs that should block an alpha
or beta, and no one has come up with one.
3) Just saying "mail 1.9-drivers" may be good enough, but I'm not convinced it
won't fall into the "someone else will deal" trap that "drivers" fell into
so often. If it won't, then that's a fine address to use.
Thoughts?
-Boris
Boris Zbarsky
> Now maybe it's my fault for not reading the Gecko meeting minutes
> (apparently those had the date)
Or not. This is what the minutes of the 2007-04-25 Gecko 1.9 meeting notes say:
Alpha Schedule update
* (plan) a4 freeze Apr 25?
And the 2007-04-24 Firefox3 meeting notes say:
Work out detailed Alpha 4 schedule [Mconnor/Preed] - COMPLETE: Alpha 4
scheduled for week of April 30th, Code freeze is after Gecko team meeting
on May 2nd.
So given that, how was I supposed to know on Apr 20 that we would be doing the
alpha now? And I really needed to know then.
-Boris
Mike Schroepfer
Yep - agreed this one was messy. We had discussed moving to a
date-driven alpha milestone schedule and planned on getting this up on
the FF3 schedule page. I'll make sure that happens by the end of this
week - which means you should know the freeze dates for a5, a6, b1, etc.
now. I'd also say we should
1) Declare an explicit driver for each milestone just like we do for
minor releases.
2) This person is on the hook for communicating in m.d.planning,
devnews, etc about freeze dates, release dates, etc and is the person to
talk to if you have any questions.
So I'll work on getting the full schedule flushed out and at the next
Gecko meeting let's get a set of drivers for each of the upcomming
milestones.
Best,
Schrep
Boris Zbarsky
> which means you should know the freeze dates for a5, a6, b1, etc.
> now.
Awesome.
> 1) Declare an explicit driver for each milestone just like we do for
> minor releases.
>
> 2) This person is on the hook for communicating in m.d.planning,
> devnews, etc about freeze dates, release dates, etc and is the person to
> talk to if you have any questions.
Perfect.
-Boris
fantasai
> Hey Bz,
>
> Yep - agreed this one was messy. We had discussed moving to a
> date-driven alpha milestone schedule and planned on getting this up on
> the FF3 schedule page. I'll make sure that happens by the end of this
> week - which means you should know the freeze dates for a5, a6, b1, etc.
> now. I'd also say we should
>
> 1) Declare an explicit driver for each milestone just like we do for
> minor releases.
>
> 2) This person is on the hook for communicating in m.d.planning,
> devnews, etc about freeze dates, release dates, etc and is the person to
> talk to if you have any questions.
Will this information be posted to m.d.planning?
~fantasai
John Gaunt
And can the Mozilla Developer's Calendar be updated with the dates as
they are decided on (and changed)? Right now I only see the dates for
the freeze and release of Alpha 4 on the calendar, although the dates
are there for 5 and 6 on the website.
redfive
Schrep
Schrep