community.aegirproject.org

Release process

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Updated by mig5 on 02/27/2011 - 15:24
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This page aims to document our release process.

The release cycle

In general, each major Hostmaster release comprises of a simultaneous release of all the modules part of the project. We generally go through a few releases before doing the first release.

  • First an alpha is released to test new functionalities and to proceed accomplishing the goals decided in the Project Roadmap for that major version. Example: 0.4-alpha1, 0.4-alpha15

  • When we have covered most of the functionalities outlined in the roadmap, we bump that to a beta. We push out beta releases until no more critical issues show up. Example: 0.4-beta1

  • Then we go into feature freeze and release a first release candidate (RC). Then a stable release branch is created, we enter a feature freeze on that branch and master is kept opened for development for the next stable release. Example: 0.4-rc1, freeze announcement

  • If no critical bug is found, a complete release is done, otherwise critical bugs are fixed and a new RC is done. That cycle repeats until no critical bugs are found, and a stable release is officially published.

  • Once a stable release is out, hotfixes are committed to the stable branch, and a stable release is published (without alpha/beta/RC) directly on the stable branch.

Making a release

Each time we make a new release, we run a script called release.sh in provision.

This script should only be used by the core dev team when doing an official release. If you are not one of those people, you probably shouldn't be running this.

This script does all the 'hard' work in that it doesn't forget all the very many places to edit version numbers etc of relevant documentation and other scripts. This includes INSTALL.txt, UPGRADE.txt, install.sh.txt and upgrade.sh.txt.

Paraphrasing from the script itself:

The following operations will be done:
1. change the makefile to download tarball
2. change the INSTALL.txt to point to tagged install.sh
3. change the UPGRADE.txt to point to release tags
4. change the install.sh.txt version
5. change the upgrade.sh.txt version
6. display the resulting diff
7. commit those changes to git
8. lay down the tag (prompting you for a changelog)
9. revert the commit
10. (optionally) push those changes

The operation can be aborted before step 6 and 9. Don't forget that as long as changes are not pushed upstream, this can all be reverted (see git-reset(1) and git-revert(1) ).

Tarballs are automatically created on http://files.aegirproject.org with associated md5sums once the tag is pushed. The install/upgrade documentation scripts in that release were automatically modified so that the URLs to those tarballs reflects the correct release.

So in short, this sums up as:

cd provision
sh release.sh 0.4-beta1 0.4-alpha15
cd ../hostmaster
git tag -a hostmaster-0.4-beta1
git push --tags

Announcing the release

We build complete release notes for every release. Those are made up of a summary of the release, an outline of key changes, of known issues, install and upgrade instructions and a full list of bugfixes and new features.

We have a handy bookmarklet that takes the list of issues and build a release-notes-ready list:

javascript:(function(){x%20=%20open().document;$(".views-field-title a").each(%20function()%20{%20x.write('* [' + $(this).attr('href').replace(/\/node\//, '#') + ': ' + $(this).text()+'](http://drupal.org'+$(this).attr('href')+ ')<br%20/>')%20})})()

The developers then proceed to format/edit the list of fixes as well as list other significant information/changes for this release. These notes end up becoming the Release Notes for the release.

Creating release nodes on Drupal.org

Once the tags are pushed and release notes published, we create a release node with an excerpt of (and a link to) the release notes so that tarballs are created and issue queue versions updated.

This needs to be done in the hostmaster and provision projects on Drupal.org.

Publish the release notes widely

Once all this is done and the tarballs are generated, the release notes are published on:

  • The link to the release notes on the frontpage of this site
  • A discussion item on this site
  • The topic of the IRC channel
  • The aegir-announce mailing list
  • Twitter as @aegirproject

Optionally, blog posts on developmentseed.org and elsewhere may go into further detail about significant changes, screencasts etc.