[Python-Dev] Code freeze?

[Scott Dial]

Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> Alterntaively, I guess you could just suggest that people check the
>> buildbot page for their platforms before downloading ....
> 
> Yes, good idea.  I'm only going to cut source tarballs for the alphas.
> 

I apologize for having doubt in your plan, and I can certainly 
appreciate the work you will be doing as release manager. But..

I don't understand who these alpha releases are supposed to be for, and 
who they will serve. When I first saw this plan, I thought "ok, you're 
the man.." But now I wonder even more if they are only going to be 
source tarballs. Who is the intended audience of these alphas? It seems 
like cutting only source tarballs is targeting developers, and if that 
is the case, I wonder if you have misplaced your motivations.

I'm not sure what developer outside of the core community would want to 
work with something missing key features and released fairly 
arbitrarily. Ok, I grant you that it's a monthly cycle, but there are no 
feature milestones involved, so it's fairly arbitrary from a utility 
standpoint; it's not clear to me that we are even worrying about all of 
the buildbots being green before releasing.

More to the point, I don't know why a developer wouldn't just checkout 
from SVN in any case. Certainly if they are going to help root out bugs, 
then we would like them to be using the trunk if possible. I fear that 
once an alpha is 2 weeks old, we will start saying "please check if its 
still a problem on the trunk."

A mild concern is how this effects checkins with individuals either 
trying to meet a deadline or even wait until after an alpha release to 
checkin a large change. I'm not sure this will happen, but having 
releases scheduled without feature milestones attached certainly changes 
the environment for work to be done in.

I guess I am hoping to understand better how these alphas serve us. 
Again, I apologize if that sounded judgmental, but I wanted to make sure 
that releasing alphas was the best plan. And again, I appreciate your 
enthusiasm and effort.

-- 
Scott Dial
scott at scottdial.com
scodial at cs.indiana.edu