pre-release craziness

i’m in bangalore this week, hanging out with the release team and marketing team guys for the GNOME 3.0 release hackfest.

i’ve never witnessed a release process this up-close-and-personal before, and i have to say that it’s totally insane. i have no idea how we ever get a release out the door. the amount of work being done by the release team is crazy. vincent and frederic have barely slept at all. andre says he had about 2 hours last night.

if you want proof, look for yourself: this month on release-team@. the gzipped archive is over 20 times the size of the month before. seems that “hard code freeze” really means “okay! go really fast now!”…

i’d feel guilty about my past transgression in this regard except for the fact that (release team member) vincent untz is busy landing a 15000 line set of changes to the panel at the moment.

the three of them disappeared today along with andreas and brian for a couple of hours. i’m not sure where they went but i think it has something to do with ingesting large amounts of crystal meth.

in other news, the location is pretty interesting. we got a chance to hang out at the intel offices and now we’re at a local university. the weather has been cooler than i expected (which is nice) and the traffic is really fantastic. we’ve come close to being dead in a terrible accident only 175 times or so. i still have to write my slides for my talk….