12.3 Schedule and development

Given that 12.2 slipped by 2 months, and the development process for 12.3 is 
"to be discussed", what schedule are we working on towards 12.3 at the moment?

Every time I've been involved in a project without a schedule, we've had a 
long period of (probably highly satisfying for developers) of 'undirected 
hacking' followed by crisis, followed by a rush to 'get it out before people 
forget who we are' which inevitably had some fallout (I'm thinking of the 
period leading up to KDE 4.0 here ;).

So I'd like to start the discussion now before we lose a month waiting to 
discuss it at osc12, where only a fraction of the active members of the 
project are is going to be  present anyway.  You don't want everything to be 
decided by German Engineers* for you do you?

Some ideas to start the ball rolling:

* openSUSE 12.2 original schedule + 8 months = openSUSE 12.2 actual release + 
4 months = Do a short cycle and release in March 2013, essentially 12.2 + 
bugfixes and updates

* openSUSE 12.2 actual release + 8 months = May 2013, business as usual, using 
a fixed process to solve the problems that caused the 12.2 slip

* Extend the release cycle keeping same process and longer stabilization 
period (effective 12.2 release process; leads to shipping 'outdated' stuff)

* Change the process to plan more features in advance (as much as this is 
realistic given we mostly ship what our upstreams deliver) and work together 
to achieve these

Please, save your 'my vote is for this' type of replies.  And if you're an 
armchair general willing to type paragraphs of email here but not a single OBS 
checkin, meeting participaton or wiki update to 12.3, go do something more 
pleasurable with your fingers instead. This discussion is not about your 
favourite kind of icecream, as if that will change anything.  

This need a reasoned discussion on what to do in future, to get a majority of 
the actors in the project to agree to act together, and then action. 

Otherwise we will default to an arbitrary schedule, several months of 
undirected hacking and taking what comes from upstream, reactive release 
management to get the result bootable and not too likely to blow up in users' 
faces, and frantic analysis of the brew by -marketing to make it sound like a 
consistent whole offering an attractive narrative of improvement (Guess what I 
did for the last few weeks).

Will

(* Something Pascal was moping about on IRC last week, I'm hoping to tempt him 
out of his cave)
-- 
Will Stephenson, openSUSE Board, Booster, KDE Developer
SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 
(AG Nürnberg) 
Maxfeldstraße 5                         
90409 Nürnberg 
Germany
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