Re: commit fests

Andrew Dunstan  wrote:
>>> Perhaps it isn't that five months is outrageous, but that it
>>> doesn't really benefit from an unorganized swarm of activity by
>>> all the developers, and we've not worked out a reasonable
>>> framework for who should do what during that time to best benefit
>>> the project while giving all these volunteer and sponsored
>>> developers something they are willing to put effort into.
> And what are they sponsored for? I can't speak for others, but with
> one exception the only sponsorship I have received is for actual
> development work, not release finishing (and the exception ended up
> being mostly development anyway). Sponsors almost always want to
> provide money for actual features.
That was one of the points I was intending to convey.  After they
confirm that the beta release works on their software, what do they
currently do for the next five months?  Currently, as things now
stand.
> And as for volunteers, they have a fantastic resistance to
> being organized in some prescriptive way. We need to achieve what
> we can by persuasion. It's sometimes a pain in the neck, but it's
> the reality.
And what do we want *them* to do after spending a couple days effort
on beta testing.  (Even if you're going to let it run for months
parallel to production, how long does it take to *set that up*?)
> The real problem is that we take a long time between the end of the
> development phase and the release. That is often not something you
> can just throw bodies at ("Nine women can't make a baby in a
> month.").
Again, kinda my point.  So what *are* the other eight *currently*
doing?  (I guess we don't want to get too graphic about that if we're
going to follow that analogy out....)
> Sadly, some things do just take time to work out. It's frustrating,
> but shortening the time could simply result in our making less
> polished releases.
I thought the quote at the top was specifically about *not*
shortening the time, but trying to figure out how we can best keep
resources working to the benefit of the project during that time.
You've as much as said that it's a given that many of the
contributors will continue to work on new patches during this period
to earn a living, while hopefully volunteering to help with getting
the release out the door on their own time.  As I understand the
arguments, having that occur as a "guilty secret", with no community
discussion or review during that period, versus trying to find a way
to organizationally admit the fact and try to manage the available
resources in a real versus pretend way is the issue here.
-Kevin