Re: Release cycle (was Re: New development plans)

From: Sam Trenholme (abiword_bugs@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Apr 26 2002 - 05:09:23 EDT

  • Next message: F J Franklin: "Proposal for New Bug-Submission Policy"

    > I only see one problem with this: we do not have
    > anyone willing to take
    > on the job as QA+Release Engineering who is able to
    > spend time on
    > putting a release candidate through its paces and
    > ask developers to fix
    > problems found. If this is should have any chance of
    > happening in a
    > timely fashion, we need someone dedicated to the
    > task.

    I don't think a formal QA/Release cycle is needed
    here; we can take advantage of the bazaar model
    big-time here.

    What I am envisioning is something like this:

    * Warn the developers three or four days in advanced
    that a new branch will be made; ideally giving an
    exact date and time (Like what happened with the 1.0.0
    release)

    * At the "freeze" time, make a new CVS branch, calling
    it, say, "1.2.6rc1" (Can CVS handle that kind of
    version name?)

    * CVS frozen on new branch for a day or so; developers
    and CVSers [1] can look at the code for nasty bugs.

    * RC branch is tagged. Tarballs, RPMS, and what not
    are made.

    * RC branch is released out to the big bad world.

    * People in said big bad world report bugs on the RC
    branch. This should only take a week or so.

    * Serious bugs (crashes, functionality broken and
    easily fixed, etc.) are fixed. Most bugs are
    deferred; this is mainly to fix things caused by last
    minute oversight.

    * Release rc2 with said bugs fixed is released about a
     week later.

    * If nothing serious (and easily fixed) shows up for a
    day or two after rc2, make it official.

    We don't need anything like a QA team and a room full
    of slaves doing regression by hand to make this kind
    of release schedule a reality.

    Does this sound like something that is easily done?
    Or am I missing some complication that this kind of
    release schedule would cause?

    - Sam

    _________________________________________________________
    Do You Yahoo!?
    La emoción e intensidad del deporte en Yahoo! Deportes. http://deportes.yahoo.com.mx



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Apr 26 2002 - 05:11:36 EDT