Release criteria for X11 releases

[Daniel Stone]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 08:56:22AM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Unfortunately, I don't know of anywhere we recorded the release
> criteria, but from what I remember from the 6.x series and the
> 6.9/7.0 release, the criteria for shipping were at least:
> 
> 1) Blocker bug list cleared

Previously, a pretty half-arsed run was made at this, if we're all
honest with ourselves.  Either it was later declared to not be a
blocker, or half-fixed, or whatever.

> 3) XTS run and passed on at least one platform (usually Linux/x86)

It'd be nice if we had an XTS that wasn't so antisocial.

> 4) Documentation updated and released

Indeed.

> For X11R7.3, it appears a incomplete attempt was made at #1 (there's
> still several unfixed bugs on the tracker list), and the rest ignored.
> Many of the input drivers packaged in the X11R7.3 directory won't build
> with the X11R7.3 headers/xserver - they were fixed in git, but not
> released as tarballs for those who use the X11R* milestones as a place
> to get a consistent set of tarballs.

I'm not releasing them as I'm not the maintainer.  If someone wants to
maintain them, then that's great, but at the moment they've spent a few
months not building _at all_, and now a while not building in any
tarballs.  What does that tell you about their maintenance?

> (Frankly I would have considered the failure to light keyboard LED's
>   known about for months before the release as a blocker just to
>   save the developers from wasting time on the inevitable flood of bug
>   reports, but the release manager seems to not agree.)

Yes, but unfortunately the fix turned out to be hideously invasive, with
a pretty huge potential for things going wrong, hence bumped to 1.4.1.

> Was making our already-delayed release date so important that the
> lessened quality of the release was worth it?   Is this good enough
> for an X.Org final release or do we want to go back to the higher bars
> of our previous release criteria for future releases?

Realistically, we could've slipped for a couple of months and still not
quite been there.  Most of it came down to me blocking 1.3.99.0 with
input stuff for a long time, and then subsequently failing to clean up,
due to XDS and a couple of other bits that I didn't realise would suck
so much of my time.

Volunteers who can stomach XTS and write documentation are, as always,
more than welcome.

Cheers,
Daniel
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