Release Process
Contents
Release Process
This page describes the release process in some detail. Getting a release out of the door without embarrassing oversights requires a bit more planning and care than one would like.
Long-term planning
A few months or weeks before the release:
- Decide it is time to make another release
- Choose features which are going to be included, and those which won't be included
- Choose a tentative date
- Begin discussions on the mailing list, reminding people to look at test cases, review patches etc.
One or two weeks before the release
- Set up a wiki planning page for the release
- Ask for volunteers, assign tasks to people
- Review thorns for code quality, documentation, test cases
- Decide on a thorn list
- Decide on a list of release-critical systems
- Collect list of new features, newsworthy items, and acknowledgements for release announcement on wiki
- Choose a concrete date
- Announce date publicly
One or two days before the release
- Have a telecon with the release team, discuss (and modify if necessary) release process and responsibilities
- Get a list of all repositories that are involved (including repositories for tools such as GetComponents)
- Publicly declare a freeze on all involved thorns and tools
- Test all thorns on all systems, collect status reports on wiki
- Update release planning wiki page with peoples', thorns', and systems' statuses
- Set up a (smaller) technical release team who will be available all day on the day of the release
- Draft release announcement
The release
- Have the technical release team meet in the same room (brick, EVO, chat, phone)
- Briefly re-check status of thorns and machines
- Possibly disable all outside write access to all critical repositories
- CREATE THE RELEASE BRANCH
- * cvs: ???
- * svn: svn copy https://<repository-server>/<repository-path>/trunk https://<repository-server>/<repository-path>/branches/ET_2010_06
- * darcs: clone the repository, appending a suffix to the name
- * git: git push origin origin:refs/heads/ET_2010_06
- * hg: ???
- Possibly update version numbers in stable/development branches
- Update component lists to point to new stable version
- Check out release branch on all systems, re-run all quick tests
- Update documentation on web sites (set up fresh copies of pdfs/htmls)
- Update tutorials on web sites (update version numbers, urls)
- Re-enable write access to all repositories
- Finalise release announcement
- ANNOUNCE
After the release
- Watch mailing lists for problem reports
- Use released version to repeat a few production simulations
Helpful Tools
This section collects a handful of useful commands that may become critical to guarantee the quality of the release. The descriptions below are quite technical and intended for the developers and maintainers only.
