Beer's First Project
The first (and perhaps only) project Beer is being applied to is the task of getting Debian 4.0, aka "etch" to be released on time.
Summary
- Project: Release of Debian etch
- Aim: To release etch on December 4th, 2006
- Criteria:
- Must meet Debian's usual standard of releasing "when it's ready"
- Must meet Debian's standard support of multiple architectures, thousands of packages, ability to do security support, etc
- Action:
- Give beers to Debian release managers Steve Langasek and Andi Barth to work full time on etch's release over the months of October and November respectively.
- Challenges:
- Debian has historically had problems releasing on time. The last release that was "on-time" was version 1.3, aka bo, released on the 2nd June 1997.
- Releasing is dependent on a number of other issues:
Team
The Debian release team consists of release managers Steve Langasek and Andreas Barth and release assistants Joey Hess, Adeodato Simó, Bill Allombert, Luk Claes and Marc Brockschmidt.
The team aims to ensure that any problems that would prohibit the release of etch are identified, communicated to the developer body, tracked and fixed (release blockers); that any packages that are unsuitable for release are either fixed or removed from etch; and that appropriate attention is given to project wide initiatives that are aiming to be complete for etch's release.
These activities are coordinated on the debian-release list and summarised at the release management page.
Project
The first step in ensuring the release is on time must be in identifying problems and ensuring the people who can best solve them are aware of them and their potential impact. To this end, Beer seeks to ensure that the release management team can devote to that problem, by offering both Steve and Andreas a month long contract to work on release management issues for the periods of October and November respectively.
Results
As a result of the release management work, we expect to see an increase in the amount of information about issues affecting the release, a decrease in the amount of time taken to communicate the consequences of these issues, and an increase in the rate at which problems get fixed.
We will talk with the the release team and other Debian developers while the project is underway and following the release of etch to see how well these expectations are met.