[Framework-Team] Current PLIP status

[Alec Mitchell]

On Sunday 11 December 2005 01:14 am, Stefan H. Holek wrote:
> This looks pretty optimistic to me. There is going to be holidays and
> sprints, and there is going to be bugdays where nobody shows up.
> PLIPs tend to need some bake-in time too, so the merge date rarely is
> the "plip-finished" date. Many Plone dependencies (AT, ATCT) are
> prone to delays as well.
>
> Plone development is very much momentum based, if you keep pounding
> people over the head with release dates they might just finish their
> stuff on time. Other than that, you will have to Release What You
> Have (tm) or wait some more...
>
> My gut feeling though is that 2.5 will overrun this plan by about 3
> months (mind you, 2.1 overran my initial estimates by 6 months ;-).

Because I trust Stefan's judgment here a great deal, I'm extending the 
proposed calendar a bit.  My plan is to do a bit of "head pounding", 
combined with a very strict Release What I Have (tm) policy.  Features that 
make it in do, those that don't, don't.  There are not any features that I 
will extend the final merge date for (though in the unlikely event that no 
features are ready I might reconsider this policy).  This release will have 
a much narrower scope than 2.1, and will hopefully be more manageable as a 
result.  The new dates follow:

Dec. 31:  Those PLIPs that are essentially on probation (#12, #105/#106, 
#112) need to have demonstrated their readiness by this date.  That means 
documentation, active development, and some communication.  In particular 
#12 needs an updated and comprehensive PLIP with risks and an assessment of 
where it fits into the event driven future of CMF; #105/106 needs someone to 
say which pieces are ready, write tests for those pieces and formally 
deprecate the old bits that they obsolete; #112 needs tests and some 
demonstration that some progress is being made on the TODO items (primarily 
it needs to show that it is not a dead end, and that it will be
actively developed).

Jan. 9:  Final day for merging of alpha1 features.  Those branches which will 
be part of the first alpha will need to be merged by this date. The days 
after this will be dedicated to making sure all the pieces play nicely 
together and wrangling up tarballs for all of Plone's dependencies.

on or before Jan. 18:  Public release of alpha1.

Feb. 4: The last day of the Snow Sprint: All branches which hope to be 
included in Plone 2.5 will be merged by this date.  This is the date at 
which the feature list of Plone 2.5 will be set.  This means that people at 
the sprint with unmerged features will need to spend some sprint time 
preparing and merging their branches.

Feb. 13: Public release of alpha2, which will be feature complete but likely 
riddled with bugs.

Mar. 6: First beta publicly released.  There will have been three bug days by 
this point hopefully the obvious major issues will have been resolved.

April 3: Three bug days later, beta2.

April 24: Release Candidate

May 8: 2.5 Final 

Now is the last chance for feedback on this schedule.  If you think it's 
unreasonably long (i.e. too far past the 6 month release goal), let me know.  
If we have good bug day participation with the alphas and betas, I think we 
could easily get this out a bit early, but it's best to use safe dates to 
avoid a marketing problem.

Alec