[Chandler-dev] release plan through Preview -- no alpha6

[Katie Capps Parlante]

We've been looking at the alpha5 schedule in the last few Chandler 
engineering meetings. Now that we've had a chance to do the bottom up 
scheduling, we've realized that we need to adjust the schedule through 
Preview. We won't have time for a full alpha6 cycle if we are to give 
ourselves a 6 week stabilization period before Preview. We decided to 
move key features into alpha5, and cut alpha6. Alpha5 will not really be 
a separate release in its own right -- alpha5 will have an extended 
end-game, and the polished result will be the final 0.7 release, also 
known as Preview.

Summary of schedule/release decisions:

- No alpha6. The alpha6 milestone target will be removed from Bugzilla.

- No further work on alpha4. Alpha4 has been stable; we don't think it 
is worth the cost to the QA team to spin another release.

- Key features added to alpha5
    - dump and reload
    - installers
    - conflict management in UI
    - edit/update remains in alpha5

- Features cut from 0.7
    - labeling/tagging
    - user defined attributes

- Feature freeze for alpha5 is Feb 15

- 6 week debug/stabilization period puts Preview at end of March. We'll 
add more structure to this period. We may need to make non-trivial 
changes during this period for performance, cosmo interop, and/or 
changes to help dogfooders. We won't be adding new features after this date.

- We're keeping "0.7 Release" as a separate milestone target in 
Bugzilla. No features or tasks should be targeted for "0.7 Release", 
only bugs or performance work. Philippe will take a pass at scrubbing 
Bugzilla to move all feature work to alpha5 or Future.

Note that this means we won't have another separate dogfood release 
before Preview. This is a bit of a risk -- we'll counter that by asking 
for testing help from dogfooders once we're past the feature freeze date 
(or even sooner).

Notes from the meetings:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/EngineeringMeetingNotes20061207
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/EngineeringMeetingNotes20061221

Cheers,
Katie