linaro-project-management team mailing list archive

[Christian Robottom Reis <kiko@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 10:07:04AM -0500, Mounir Bsaibes wrote:
> > So my question stands: we don't control upstream and can't assign a
> > blueprint to a monthly milestone as we don't have control over when it
> > will actually land.  How should this be handled?
> 
> Should we have another milestone called 'Upstream' for example? (This
> milestone would be a place holder milestone similar to the 'Backlog'
> milestone)

Conceptually, I think this is a bit bogus. Backlog is an accurate
indication of the scheduling of an unstarted blueprint or bug (i.e. its
milestone is unknown), whereas a task which is already being worked on
has context around it, which would be lost if you just retargeted the
task to upstream.

And besides, don't you want engineers to want to get better at
predicting when their work will be accepted? I get the argument that
upstreaming code is hard to predict, but it is definitely not /totally/
chaotic and unpredictable -- if the patch concept is sane then it's a
number of interations and then hitting a merge window. There's something
of a rhythm to it. It shouldn't take multiple months for most patches to
be accepted, and epic patches (see CMA) should be specially planned for.
-- 
Christian Robottom Reis, Engineering VP
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