release schedule and Linux distros

[Jens Petersen]

On Jun 15, 2012 6:11 PM, "Iain Lane" <laney at debian.org> wrote:
> I'm indeed not on this list so please CC me in any replies that you want
> me to see.

(Any chance of you joining? ;) :)

> > > For example looking at the coming Fedora 18 development cycle [2] the
> > > Alpha freeze is currently 2012-08-14 and Beta freeze is set for
> > > 2012-09-18.
> > > So for Fedora at least, if we wanted to have ghc-7.4.2+ and Haskell
> > > Platform 2012.4 in the next release [...], then I think we would need
the final
> > > 2012.4 release in August and an alpha/beta release in July.

>  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuantalQuetzal/ReleaseSchedule
>
> The freeze we should be aiming to have all major churn in by is Feature
> Freeze. So that's August 23 for this release, and roughly every six
> months (give or take a couple of weeks) thereafter.

So realistically when would you like to see the 2012.4 release, beta, and
alpha?

How about a tight schedule for 2012.4 something like this (now that we have
the luxury of the ghc-7.4.2 release in our hands:)?:

Alpha (2012.3.80.x): June 30
Beta (2012.3.90.x): July 15
Final (2012.4.0.x): August 1

- x's indicate increments for RC's and bugfixes etc: not sure about
compatibility of this versioning scheme - anyway just a concept I am
putting out here
- randomly chosen days that probably need to be re-aligned to weeks

Even if HP slips by a week or so if the changes are minor then probably it
should still be possible for Ubuntu, Fedora and others to update smoothly
from Beta to Final etc.

Mark: this is a fair bit earlier than the original proposed schedule -
would this work for you this time at all?

I know it is over Summer-time but time-wise postponing to HP 2013 will
still make the time between 2012.4 and 2013.2 very short. Obviously going
forward we don't need to make the schedule so tight: surely we could have a
whole month or more for each milestone (alpha, beta, final).

> I'd like if if there were snapshot releases (call them
> 'alpha', 'beta' and 'release candidate') throughout the development
> cycle, so that we can better ensure that we're sticking to the platform
> without having to watch the repository.

Yes +1: used your idea above :)

> I also want to say that we (both Debian and Ubuntu) tend not to stick
> too rigidly to the platform's versions of packages. This is for two main
> reasons that I can think of

Nod, understood.  Fedora has also done that somtimes. Anyway I guess we
would all prefer to be close to the official platform if  possible. :)

Jens
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