Re: Xen 4.6 Development Update (two months reminder)

[Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>]

(culling the cc list a lot)

On Thu, 2015-03-12 at 11:54 +0000, Jan Beulich wrote:
> >>> On 12.03.15 at 11:21, <wei.liu2@citrix.com> wrote:
> > == Linux ==
> 
> Wouldn't it make sense to move external projects down, and have
> our core pieces (hypervisor, tool stack, maybe qemu) be near the
> top?

When I originally started tracking external things back in whichever
release I was RM for there was only a couple of big ticket external
items. It seems that today there are dozens of things ranging from the
small to the large which are obscuring the work which is actually
happening within the Xen release itself (the list is now so long that is
a proper chore to read through it and pay attention).

Added to that is the fact that the list in general has become something
of a laundry list of everything anyone has ever thought of or someone
once considered working on, rather than things which are of some
importance to the 4.6 release.

Along with the fact that it must be a load of work to maintain I think
there is a danger nobody will read it because it is so overwhelming.

Wei, perhaps one or more of these could be applied:
      * raise the bar for inclusion in the list for external projects to
        be only the very largest most important items;
      * Stop tracking external projects altogether unless they have a
        direct interaction with the 4.6 release;
      * raise the bar for inclusion in the list for all projects a bit,
        i.e. not every little change to xen.git needs to be tracked;
      * be more aggressive about garbage collecting old ideas which
        aren't seeing any actual progress in this release window.

WRT the third one, I wonder if it is necessary for the RM to track
everything which is going on in the world WRT Xen. Just tracking those
items which we as a community have decided we want to get into 4.6 and
for which we feel there is a realistic chance of that happening would
make the list more manageable, which reduces the burden on you as well
as those trying to read the list.

I'm not saying that only things which are considered blockers for 4.6
should be on the list, but perhaps raise the bar from including every
possible wishlist item e.g. to only include important stuff, and drop
the nice to haves?

Ian.