alpha

The Informal Summer Gathering - USB HID, Filesystem bug-squashing and Media Kit encoding

Blog post by stippi on Sun, 2009-08-02 18:49
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After I didn't write the promised report on the last Coding Sprint which took place after BeGeistert in April, I am now trying not build up an even bigger lag. Last week, Axel and his girlfriend Claudia hosted Michael, Ingo and myself at their nice home in Hannover, Germany. Oliver could sadly not attend our small, relatively spontaneous and informal Coding Sprint due to sickness, although he seemed to be with us in spirit considering all his ICU commits. (The ICU libraries are an important foundation of the forthcomming Haiku Locale Kit.)

R1/Alpha : Welcoming the Newcomers

Blog post by stpere on Tue, 2009-04-07 16:00
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Context

Imagine the release just got out the door; what needs to be ready at this point to get everything running smoothly ?...

Newcomers

We need some structure to welcome newcomers (developers and others) effectively. I think many -- everything is relative -- people with various skills will come and may ask things like :

  1. Where can I help ?
  2. I want to port [insert favorite software from linux] !!!!
  3. Many others...

We should make sure that we can "steer" them to the correct teams (according to their tastes).

My understanding is that the team concept is quite loose at the moment. It fits well with a relatively small core of developers, since it doesn't add unnecessary "ceremony". But I think as the community will grow, it might be useful to have some light structure. There would be no bosses for say, but welcomers, mentors. They would be a small set of people that knows the inners of the topics relative to the team tasks and can help the beginners to get started, invite them to suscribe to the MLs, etc..

We should stress out the fact that at that point, we need more than coders.. We will need people in those teams too :

  1. User guides, documentation,...
  2. Artwork
  3. Quality Assurance
  4. Public Relations
  5. ...

Some other peoples will without any doubts try Haiku out of curiosity, and know almost nothing from it before hand, and we might need to be able to answer their questions. A good first approach possibly means that they will share their experience with friends, and you see the cascade coming right? Depending the volume of those requests, it can be quite time consuming to answer verbosely to everyone.. So we should make sure the user guide is so good that we will gladly point them to it! :) But it might be nice to have some PR representants to help answer the questions.. ;-)

Again, comments welcome, it's definitely not complete nor definitive.. Just some food for thoughts :)

Alpha release coordination / plan

Blog post by stpere on Mon, 2009-04-06 19:03
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Greetings,

I'm proposing myself as a release coordinator for the upcoming Alpha Release, and here are the highlights of the plan.

First, this plan shouldn't be applied before those conditions are met :

  • the LiveCD works quite good (with no major issues left). My understanding of that topic is that we still need the FS overlay (that allows attributes over iso9660) to support live queries. If there is anything more to add to this point, please comment. Plus, the ioscheduler should be tweaked to enhance the user experience using that media.
  • all the criticals (blockers) issues already identified are fixed. I see that a lot of them have already been taken care of; that's good! :)

So basically, my plan tries to moderate the pressure on the developper workforce while at the same time optimize the benefits from the release (attention from the community at large, etc..)

What I propose is to set a condition list, that when all met, will trigger the countdown. So here is the basic timeline I propose :

RELEASE -4 weeks : Trigger

All conditions are met according to the release comitee. Feature freeze is announced to start after this week.

RELEASE -3 weeks : Feature freeze is effective

Bugfixes only. Medium tolerance to regressions.
First release of a preview livecd at the end of the week.
QA team gets the livecd to play with. Basically, we try to boot it from everywhere :) But at this step, it shouldn't be the firsts steps of the livecd, so should be somewhat useable already.

We tag/branch/(whatever it is called under svn) the repository.. all work that might "break" things temporarely are done on the new "unstable" branch. Fixes to what will become the release goes to the "stable" branch.

We put a countdown on the website, with a hot-linkable banner so that fans can blog about it and displays the countdown on their site.

RELEASE -2 weeks :

Bugfixes only. Low tolerance to regressions.
Call to test the livecd newest release.

Backport the main fixes that have been tested in unstable.

RELEASE -1 week :

Bugfixes only!! No tolerance for regressions.

Major Fixes regarding LiveCD are still accepted.

At this point, there should only be trivial bug fixes on other components. Of course the software is still alpha, but we have to get ready for the R-Day..

Special attention is paid to documentation and website..

RELEASE -3 days :

Past this point, the alpha tree is frozen.. the final images are in production

RELEASE -2 days :

Images are uploaded, seeded, ... we get the md5sum of the images..

RELEASE -1 day :

QA team test a final time the images. There is not much to be done at that time.

RELEASE!

Press releases are sent! Website is switched in release mode! The webserver braces itself!! :)

Okay, comments welcome..

Keep in mind that it's a draft ;-) On future posts, I will start the discussion regarding the formats we will distribute in (LiveCD, UsbStick, VMWare Images, etc...)

Mindmap of the discussion on alpha 1

Blog post by nielx on Wed, 2008-02-27 21:59
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A nice overview in mind map format, for those of you interested.

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