Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2018 13:17:39 +0100
From: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
To: alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: [alpine-devel] a release engineering team?
Message-ID: <20181127131739.658683ac@ncopa-desktop.copa.dup.pw>
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Hi,

I would like to form a release engineering (releng) team, who gets the
responsibility to figure out how and when to do releases, and to
document this process. This team will also get the responsibility to go
over issues and PRs and decide which we should try fix/include for a
given release and which should be postponed.

Who would be interested in joining me with this?


The current issues I'd like to discuss are:

- regular edge releases/snapshots
We need to do edge snapshot releases more often. How do we do that?
what name of the tag? I have previously done tags like vYYMMDD (eg.
v150306 and v160223). I think v2018.11.0 is clearer though. 

I don't think we need full release, with all iso image flavors. It may
be enough with minirootfs tarball and maybe netboot and
alpine-standard.iso.

- small releases
It maybe good to be able to create smaller releases of the stable
branches, which only include minirootfs image and possibly netboot. I
was thinking of add a version digit for this (eg v3.8.1.1), so when
there are 4 digits in the release tag in stable branch, it will only
generate a minirootfs image. We could also do this for the edge
releases. For example, v2018.11 could be a big release, with all iso
images generated, while v2018.11.1 is a small release, with only
minirootfs generated. Alternatively we could have a different name of
the git tag. for example: v3.8.1-mini2, to indicate that it should only
generate minirootfs.

- keep release data in separate repository
Our release scripts will currently generate release when we create a
tag in aports repository. The idea was to make it very easy to create
releases, you just git push --tags and you're done. The reality is a
bit more complicated. We need make sure they have built all packages,
no build failures, close the target version in bugtracker, create new
target version etc. If the build of release images fails for some
reason, we cannot fix that and redo the build without first delete the
git tag (which is very complicated since tag needs to be deleted from
git mirrors as well), so in practice it means we need to fix the
problem and create new version tag.

I think it would be better if we could do something like:
1) lock git repo so noone can push new commits
2) send message to builder to try build release
   - if failure report back and release lock
   - if success:
     - release lock
     - create and push release tag in aports repo
     - upload release images


Ideas? thoughs?

-nc



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