Yesterday, the Fedora 11 Retrospective Meeting was held, I had the chance to be invited there as a member of the Marketing group. This meeting, done by phone, was a cross-group talk to see what went well and not so well during the Fedora 11 release cycle. The goal is to gather feedback so we can learn from our errors to create an even better Fedora 12. People from the Ambassador group, Fedora Board, Design team, Marketing team, Documentation team, FESCo, Infrastructure team, Quality Insurance team, Release Engineering, Translation team and Website team were present, everyone had around 5 minutes to talk.
I found it very useful even if I didn’t talk too much; Jack, the Marketing team leader, did a good job of saying what needed to be said on our side :p
Long story short, it looks like Fedora 12 will be a “stabilization” release compared to Fedora 11. The main demands could be summed up with:
- A longer freeze period before release would be nice.
- More features need to be tested by QA.
- Testing periods should be longer.
- Last minute features should be pushed to rawhide for the next release instead of being squeezed in the current cycle.
- A better communication between groups is needed.
- In every group, more feedback is needed.