Fedora 11 Rains Test Days

One of the best things to come out of the development cycle for Fedora 11 is a continuous stream of test days.  James Laska with the help of Adam Williamson shows up every week to lead the charge–sometimes twice in the same week.

Before Fedora 10 there were no official test days as we know them now.  Fedora 10 had a series of test days and when Fedora 11 came along they became the standard.  It always makes me smile when I read somewhere or hear someone say “we really need to have a test day for that.”  A year ago no would have been familiar with that term.  James just showed up and started arranging weekly test days and now the rest is history.  Just because James and Adam organize them doesn’t mean they don’t continue to need more help.

Another great thing that has happened during the Fedora 11 development cycle is live images created specifically for the test day–with the added bonus that are known to work good enough to install or run live.  I spent most of the test days during the Fedora 10 cycle just trying to get rawhide to install or update to a workable system.  This part of the ”rawhide process” is still broken–not having a canonical place to easily find out in advance whether rawhide is “good” that day or not.

What if someone else volunteered to be responsible for creating and making the live image available on test day?  The feature list for each new release continues to grow and there is no way that this ”core duo” can continue to do all the heavy lifting.  Talking to James it sounds like running two test days a week consumes a lot time more time than just those two days which is a lot of time itself.

So what does this mean?

A few ideas I have:

• Link to each test day page from the feature page
• What if during the planning phase of a release the QA team selected in advance which test days they would host and run?
• Create a test day process that is more scalable and doesn’t depend solely on James and Adam to make them happen
• What if there was a framework, kind of like the feature page process, where other non-regular QA team participants could propose and hold their own test days?

Test days beyond the ones owned by QA would be volunteer driven–much like the feature process.  The idea that if you show up to own and do the work it is yours.  And if you don’t prepare for and host the test day it doesn’t happen.

The QA team could still help advertise and schedule the test days, but the test case development, wiki page creation, image generation, etc. would be done by the people desiring the test day.  Which could mean anyone interested in Fedora.

It is definitely possible.  Look at this fantastic test day page for KVM created by virtualization developer Mark McLoughlin.  You can join in the fun and participate on May 7, 2009.  This page even tells you what you need to do before the test day starts, how many people are needed, and what kind of time commitment is required.  This clicks with the way I think and am motivated.

I am much more likely to commit time to something that looks well planned and sets out to honor my time and effort because the time I can commit is limited.  Most people with limited time are looking for a tangible practical place to plug in and help.  Well written test day pages provide that and help Fedora grow beyond where it is today.

Getting Status

This video called Auto Tuning makes me laugh every time I watch it.

And I’ve watched it several because because I’ve been “Blake” more times than I can remember.  It is a hilarious illustration and reminder of how challenging some folks make it to get information.

I thought of it too in light of the Fedora release readiness meetings where representatives from each team are friendly, positive, and helpful which means we usually finish in 60 minutes or less!  The minutes from the last meeting are here. We’ll have one more release meeting before the GA release.  The dates are all on the schedule.

This isn’t to say all areas of the Fedora Project are perfect or that people like Jack (character in the video) don’t exist. I just hope we can keep it the exception and not the norm.

I wonder if there would be a way to hook up auto tune to Fedora Talk?

Fedora 12 is Next

Yes, I’m getting ahead of myself a little.  The Fedora 11 beta was just released, but if you are already working on something for Fedora 12 that doesn’t mean you can’t tell the world about it now using the Fedora Feature process.  We re-vamped the process almost a year ago to make it possible for FESCo to review and accept features for releases beyond the release currently under development.  If you are navigating this process for the first time and are not quite sure what to do feel free to contact me.

Several weeks ago I also  proposed a schedule for Fedora 12.  The Fedora schedule process consists of a schedule proposed by the Release Engineering team which is reviewed and approved by FESCo.  I’ve filed a ticket to track this task in Release Engineering, but naturally they’ve been busy getting ready for the Fedora 11 beta.

Some people are probably thinking it is way too early to be thinking about the Fedora 12 schedule and that we should wait and see what happens with Fedora 11.  I’d like to think that our processes are mature enough now and our schedules built in a predictable enough fashion that we don’t have to focus solely on the release at hand.  One of the goals for Fedora 11 was to have a full six month release schedule followed by a return to the established “Halloween/May Day” schedule (releasing every six months on or near October 31st and May 1st) for Fedora 12.  I think it is important to start thinking about and planning for this shorter release.

Obviously the Fedora 12 schedule is a draft, but I think it is a solid proposal for completing Fedora 12 in five months.  This isn’t the first time we have attempted a five month release.  Fedora 8 was completed in five months to get us on the original “Halloween/May Day” schedule.  The development time frame is shorter in this proposed schedule, but the testing durations and freeze periods we’ve found to work well remain the same.  This results in a proposed Fedora 12 GA date of 2009-10-27.

September 18, 2009–Updated information on Fedora 12

OS Bridge Call For Papers Extended

Not only has the call for papers been extended, so has the early bird rate of $175 (approximately $1,000 less than OSCON).

Here is a fun graph we can all relate to that shows paper submissions over time with the expected spike right at the deadline–now extended until April 10, 2009.

Looking at the full list of proposals it doesn’t appear that the organizers extended the deadline because of a shortage of proposals either.  Still, the more proposals the better so get yours in now!