Re: Soft Feature Freeze has started since Nov.1 for dk2-stable201811

[Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com>]

Hi,

On 11/07/18 02:12, Gao, Liming wrote:
> Hi, all

> https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/EDK-II-Release-Planning
> lists edk2-stable201811 tag planning. Now, we enter into Soft Feature
> Freeze phase. In this phase, the feature under review will not be
> allowed to be pushed. The patch review can continue without break.
> Here is edk2-stable201811 tag planning.

> 2018-08-15 Beginning of development
> 2018-11-01 Soft Feature Freeze
> 2018-11-08 Hard Feature Freeze
> 2018-11-15 Release

I don't think an announcement should be made like this, one week after
the fact. (If I missed the exact dates on yesterday's stewards' call,
then I apologize.)

If we are making the announcement about the Soft Feature Freeze on
2018-Nov-07, then the Soft Feature Freeze should start no earlier than
2018-Nov-08 or so. Certainly not retro-actively.

Perhaps we should push the schedule by one week.

I understand that will prevent the stable tag from being dropped
*exactly* three months after start of development (2018-Aug-15). I think
that should be fine. Nobody forces us to work in cycles of *exactly*
three months. (Even if we slipped over to December, that shouldn't be a
huge problem; we'd just call the tag "edk2-stable201812".) The workflow
itself is work-in-progress.

I realize that
<https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/EDK-II-Release-Planning>
has had the dates available all this time. But, the reason we make the
announcements in the first place is precisely that people don't keep
staring at that page.

(

For example, I reviewed and pushed 4 patches yesterday (on 2018-Nov-06):

  1  e038bde2679b Revert "OvmfPkg/QemuVideoDxe: list "UnalignedIoInternal.h" in the INF file"
  2  98856a724c2a Revert "OvmfPkg/QemuVideoDxe: VMWare SVGA device support"
  3  438ada5aa5a1 Revert "OvmfPkg/QemuVideoDxe: Helper functions for unaligned port I/O."
  4  328409ce8de7 Revert "OvmfPkg: VMWare SVGA display device register definitions"

which are the first four patches (out of five) from the following
series:

  [edk2] [PATCH v2 0/5] OvmfPkg: simply use the Bochs interface for vmsvga

These reverts are arguably not bugfixes; they are preparation for
re-implementing a feature from scratch (the last patch in that series).
Thus, had I known we were already in the Soft Feature Freeze, I wouldn't
have pushed them, because the review was not complete before the soft
freeze start.

But I had just returned from a week (or more) of PTO, there was no
announcement on the list yet, and I didn't remember the wiki page.

(In the technical sense, the reverts are not disruptive, luckily; they
remove code that is dead anyway.)

)

This is my opinion at least -- I'm ready to be overruled, but I wanted
to voice it.

Thanks
Laszlo