As a follow-up to my posts on the testing and releng lists I met today with James Laska, Jesse Keating, Bill Nottingham, Paul Frields to harness the power of Fedora Talk and Gobby to hammer out the Release Engineering and QA schedules.

It took a little longer than I had hoped (1.5 hours), but one can only imagine how long it would have taken if we had continued the route we were going over email.  I don’t think we would have come up with as many good ideas or ways to make the task flow as well either.  I keep saying it, but I’m not sure how many people agree–sometimes we just get more done when we talk on the phone and have something we can all see an interact with–no matter where we were.  In contrast to to our Design meeting on Friday, this time we had two people on the west coast collaborating with three people on the east coast–all in different locations!

Check out the latest version of the Release Engineering schedule or add the iCal file to your favorite calendaring application.

Here is a summary of some of the interesting things that came out of the schedule discussion:

  • we made sure there were enough blocker bug review meetings ahead of each freeze and test release candidate creation
  • we will not create Release Candidates if there are bugs remaining on the the blocker list
  • if we cannot create the Release Candidates because the blocker list is not clear we will move to slip the release a week
  • at the final blocker review on Monday, 2009-10-26 if the blocker list is clear we will move forward with the release–regardless of what might be found after the fact because of the inability to unwind PR activities that have been set in motion.

I think this is a great move forward for setting forth how we propose to handle the end-game of our releases and also creating the contingency plans now.  I’m a little sceptical of the last bullet because I have never seen Fedora be this inflexible.  I’m also wondering if there is a little flexibility in the PR process that has been misunderstood.  I’m sure we will figure out a good way to go about it.