Re: Xen 4.4 development update -- RFC for feature freeze timeline

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@eu.citrix.com>]

On 27/09/13 08:41, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> On 26.09.13 at 18:47, George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@eu.citrix.com> wrote:
>> Nonetheless, it does seem likely that delaying for a month may allow a
>> significant number of important features to get in.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
> I'm in favor of pushing back by a month as long as this allows at
> least a fair share of the listed pending things to go in.

Well it's really hard to say -- back in January I said that the USB 
hot-plug series was basically ready to go in, but it wasn't ready by 
April when we had the feature freeze.  Sometimes I feel like I'm reading 
tea leaves here. :-)  All we can do is make our best stab at things, and 
then go back and see how we did.

> An
> alternative would be a weak feature freeze (no new features
> except for a well defined set) on the original date, but that would
> certainly undermine the stabilizing phase to some degree.

Well in theory it would allow "frozen" parts of the code (those not 
touched by the well-defined set of features) to start stabilizing while 
we are still working on non-frozen parts.  But the non-frozen parts 
still need to be stabilized, and the features we are talking about 
including are pretty big and will need a decent amount of time for 
stabilization; so I don't really see how doing a partial freeze is going 
to really help that much.

  -George