On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 8:52 AM, Greg Stein <gst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> We are not the only software project in the world working on hard >> problems or that finds it difficult to provide estimates. It sucks, >> but part of being a professional is doing the best you can. > > Do you think that you can plan around *volunteers*? Yes, I do. I assume volunteers will only sign themselves up for tasks they believe they can complete. In many cases, they may choose to simply not sign themselves up at all and if they get extra time to complete a task than it is just a bonus. Do you think our mix of paid/volunteers is radically different from other open-source projects? There are plenty of projects that provide estimates on release dates. Many projects give these estimates far in advance of the release and still deliver on the date, or adjust their roadmap when things change. > Or for those > employed to work on svn, how much time they will have available? And > has each of these employees specified their available time, what > they're working on, and how long it will take them? Has all of this > been collected across all of these volunteers into a workable plan? > ... Nope. Ok, you are in a room together. Assemble the plan. Why wouldn't everyone in that room want to have an idea on how the remaining problems are going to be tackled and possibly who is going to sign up to take them? Do you want to work on an issue only to see someone else commit the same change before you do? There are so few issues left, that just by figuring out who plans to do the remaining items we ought to be able to forecast a release date from that. > Only if we knew everybody's time commitments. I don't know mine; I > have no hard schedule. Do you have the schedules for the Collab.Net > employees? That would solve part of the problem. Yes. Bert, Mike and Paul are all fully engaged on Subversion. I would say 40 hours a week but I think that does a disservice to the amount of time they put into the project. At some point, I imagine Bert will turn attention to SharpSVN and AnkhSVN, but right now he seems fully committed to wrapping up 1.7 issues. Mike and Paul are full time on Subversion. If there are people that would have more time to devote to 1.7 if they were being paid, feel free to contact me privately. I have already reached out to everyone I thought might have some time though. I could also ask Kamesh and his team to devote more time specifically to 1.7 if there are specific tasks we want him to look at. > Yes. People are not confident that we've capture everything in the > issue tracker. Go ahead and apply "push" as you deem appropriate. > We've been talking about it here, but we certainly haven't pushed each > other so far. By "push" I just mean that sometimes we hold a to-do list in our heads or on our computers that we really should be pushing to the entire community. If anyone has items related to the release that they think needs to be done, whether it be API review, docstring review, checking our Apache release process etc.. We should create issues so that the big picture of remaining work is in a single location we can all see. That is all I mean by this. I also think that by forcing people to talk about this, maybe there will be a collective realization that we are close to the release. > Turn that around: what are YOU expecting. Hyrum said we would start > cutting releases on June 1. What else would you like? The pre-releases seem more for Hyrum to work out our Apache release process than for anything else. I want to know when to expect the release candidate so that I can then have a rough approximation of the GA. > I think we're all aware of this. I also think that we're working on > getting the last bits wrapped up. Maybe it isn't the form that you > would like? I appreciate the hard work people have been doing to finish the release. The issue close rate the last month has been very good. I want everyone to see that the finish line is right in front of us. I want you all to take advantage of this rare chance of being in the same room to talk to each other and get consensus on the remaining work. > June 1, we'll start some early releases. So far, there isn't anything > further to say, with confidence. If you have ideas on how to make > statements with greater confidence, then please do so. I don't think > it will be coming out of this room. I think there are two primary things that you could accomplish by being together and able to talk to each other: 1) Talk about what stands between where we are now and a finished release. Make note of any items not captured in the tracker and add them. 2) Talk about some of these items in detail and the right approach to solving them. Doing #1 will give people confidence that there is not much left to do, or it will at least reveal all the things we have not captured already. Doing #2 should give a sense on how much work it will take and possibly who can do it. -- Thanks Mark Phippard http://markphip.blogspot.com/
