Re: Google and the Beta Freeze

On Thursday 18 May 2006 10:39, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Treat <xzilla(at)users(dot)sourceforge(dot)net> writes:
> > On Thursday 18 May 2006 05:47, Simon Riggs wrote:
> >> I've just noticed that Google's Summer of Code projects are due to
> >> finish on August 21, 2006 at 08:00 Pacific Daylight Time.
> >>
> >> Which is three weeks past the beta freeze date of Aug 1st.
> >>
> >> Anyone see any problems there?
> >
> > None of these projects will be a surprise to anyone, so in theory we
> > could allow them to continue with submissions after the feature freeze
> > date...
>
> If we were going to allow SOC to determine our release schedule, we'd
> probably have to push back beta freeze at least two months --- we
> couldn't expect to go beta immediately after someone submits code,
> especially if the someone is a student whose code will need review
> before it goes in.
>

One issue here is that the applicants may not have time to spend working on
thier projects after the SoC is Finished. Remember the idea here is that the
students can be *done* with the project the end of the summer, where *done*
to me means that the code should be in a fairly acceptable format for
inclusion (and it is up to mentors to keep folks on track, getting some code
review along the way). If those submissions get pushed back to next release
I think you are going to have a hard time looking these people up 3-4 months
down the line to finish things...

> I'm not particularly eager to do this, especially not when we don't
> even have any committed SOC projects. There's always the next release.
>

IMHO pushing the date back 1 month (to Sept 1st) would give ample time for
both any SoC projects to be finished, and probably work a little better for
the community. Between the Summit and OSCon July is going to be a busy month,
and that August 1st deadline will come pretty quick. That said, I think we
should at least wait until we know how many projects we are talking about
(and what they are) before making a decision.

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL