[sugar] Sugar and OLPC release processes

[Morgan Collett]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 09:40, Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 3:11 AM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>>> * SugarLabs should try to schedule his release a few months before the
>>> OLPC release target date (something around 2-3 months). That will give
>>> us enough time to ensure everything is stable before we start
>>> integrating the new code in the OLPC distribution.
>>
>> Is this lead time too great?  Longer lead times will give OPLC greater
>> stabilization time at the risk of delaying new features.  These delays
>> _may_ start to increase requests for feature freeze exceptions.
>
> Yeah, that's the point I'm uncertain about. Since our schedule is
> currently largely driven by OLPC needs, perhaps OLPC should suggest a
> lead time they are comfortable with...
>
> The only strong requirement I see in this respect is that SugarLabs
> feature freeze is *before* OLPC feature freeze (OLPC does not have a
> sharp freeze date, but an approximate time period should be enough to
> synchronize).

What concerns me about a long lead time between Sugar and OLPC
releases is that Sugar developers may spend much of that time on
testing and bugfixing and minor releases for OLPC once the stable
Sugar/Sucrose release is done. This eats into the feature development
time for the next release.

Also, OLPC will probably not have planned the features for the
following release when the next Sugar development cycle opens (before
the OLPC current release is done) and may only come up with feature
requirements close to the following Sugar feature freeze (if not after
it)...

Morgan