Hi, it is certainly a bit too early to look back at the etch release process, as we still haven't released yet, but I'd like to share some thoughts on what happened. Please note that these are entirely personal views.
Back in September, it seemed impossible to the GNOME team to bring GNOME 2.16 into a releasable state before the planned release date. We took then the hard decision to keep GNOME 2.14 and bring only the few parts of 2.16 that weren't disruptive (meaning especially, no gtk+ 2.10 and no gnome-vfs transition to dbus). It should be obvious now that, with the delays the release is facing, this decision was wrong. With the icon themes fixing, I think the last showstopper for GNOME 2.16 is now fixed. Of course, at the time it became clear it would be possible to polish 2.16 before the release, the distribution was already frozen. The result is, we have a desktop with less bugs, more features and speed improvements, which is almost completely ready (apart from evince) for the upcoming stable release, and it's not going to be shipped. Currently it is only used by a handful of people running experimental. As GNOME 2.18 is scheduled in two months, this means we will be lagging two versions behind upstream as soon as we have released. Not only did it generate more work as we had two GNOME versions to maintain during the freeze, but it is now generating a lot of frustration because this extra work looks like a loss of time. It is my belief that such things could be avoided if we had proper release management. Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to throw stones at the release team, especially because I couldn't have done better myself, and because I'm partly responsible for the GNOME decision. The release team is doing an excellent job; unfortunately this job isn't about management, but about technical expertise. Of course this is helping the release, but I wouldn't call it "management". Fixing RC bugs is a thing, setting release goals and dates depending on lots of people's work is another. Management is quite a different job that what most of us are doing. In the real world, a good manager is as rare a resource as a good engineer, and you need both to make a business running. The Debian project is currently good at attracting technically excellent people, but we also need a few people with management skills, and currently I fail to see what could bring them to work for the project. As of now, I see it as a failure of the project. But this is also nothing that can't be fixed. What do you people think could be done to bring the skills we are lacking to the project, with its current structure? -- .''`. : :' : We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code. `. `' We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to `- our own. Resistance is futile. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
