[LEDE-DEV] Release Planning - Current Status?

[Rich Brown]

Hi Jo,

> there hasn't been much progress on the planning since I didn't follow
> any mails for the last week or so :)
> 
> I plan to factor in the various suggestions into the roadmap I initially
> posted and put the result into the wiki tomorrow.

Excellent! Once that's public, we can spread the word on the forums as needed.

> The idea is to have a definitive timeline until Friday so we can start
> branching and preparing builds.

Sounds good.

> I'm not totally sure whether we want to have a distinct RC phase (as in
> tagging RCs). The pre-release branch build artifacts can serve the same
> purpose and are reasonably stable - there should be no incompatible
> kmods every 24h in contrast to master builds as the kernel config will
> likely remain the same unless we really need to fix something there.

I have a few questions/concerns:

- Who are the people driving the release? Who makes the decisions about when to freeze features, to review bug reports, to branch, etc? (I care mostly that there is a decision-making process in place, not so much about the particular choices.)

- Your note directly addresses my worries about incompatibilities during testing. I think people hold off on testing a project because it's moving too quickly. A symptom of this is people who're complaining that they can't load package xyz today because their build from yesterday had all its underpinnings switched out overnight. 

- I believe we will see a step function in the number of people testing once we declare a version that will remain stable for a week or two, that can be opkg'd safely a couple days after the initial install. And given that it's a pain in the patootie for most people to flash their firmware (especially getting "clearance" from our spouses and children who rely on the router), these people will flock to try out LEDE once we cross that threshold.

- As someone who's trying to come up with a description of this ever-changing software status, I want to know that there'll be a "name" or a URL that I can use to refer people to that "stable" (stable-ish) build once we get a "release candidate" out.

- Has anyone been thinking about publicity for the release candidates and final? I envision an expanding circle of announcements for our release candidates: First to lede-dev and the forum. Later an announcement on the OpenWrt forum. And who's going to write the announcement for Slashdot? Do we need to buy another server first? :-) 

Thanks.

Rich