[Dev] Last call: Alpha releases [Was: Phases and 0.7 milestone schedule]

[Katie Capps Parlante]

We'd like to move ahead with the idea of ~2 month "alpha releases". 
Speak up before Wednesday if you object to the general idea.

Cheers,
Katie

Katie Capps Parlante wrote:
> Sheila and Mimi put together proposals that identify "phases" for each 
> 0.7 tenet. Each phase is a somewhat coherent set of features that are 
> testable, and that an end user could experiment with.
> 
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-February/004105.html
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-February/004108.html
> 
> They've also identified priorities for calendar improvements, a proposal 
> for which work gets done first:
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-February/004065.html
> 
> Heikki, Lisa, Alec and others have been arguing strongly for shorter 
> releases, and I think there is general agreement that we'd like to have 
> something stable that a user could play with before we finish the whole 
> scope of 0.7 work we have in front of us.
> 
> Putting this together, I'd like to propose that we have longer, more 
> stable milestones during the 0.7 timeframe, and that we think about each 
> milestone as a mini-release (alpha release, if you will). Strawman 
> proposal:
> 
> + Milestones are ~2 months apart, and feature driven.
> 
> + Each phase proposed by Sheila and Mimi falls into a milestone. (We 
> could make adjustments once we scope out the work -- one phase could 
> take two milestones if it had to or we could do two phases in one 
> milestone if they fit).
> 
> + We spend more time testing and stabilizing each milestone.
> 
> + We provide a path to migrate data from milestone to milestone.
> 
> + The expectation is that dogfood users could download the milestone and 
> use it.
> 
> + We could use the term "alpha" instead of "milestone" (a nod to 
> previous discussions about milestone release numbering).
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> We still need to do more work on bottom up planning to put real dates on 
> this and see if it works out, but if we have agreement on the general 
> idea it will provide a structure for the bottom up planning.
> 
> Cheers,
> Katie
> 
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