Subject: [alpine-devel] Soft freeze imposed for 3.6 release prep

From: William Pitcock <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2017 11:56:10 -0500

Hi,

We are imposing a soft freeze in edge for now, as part of preparation
for the 3.6 release.

In case anyone forgot the rules:

- minor changes such as non-ABI breaking version bumps are still allowed

- changes to an existing package's structure (such as the recent
nss-static change) are not allowed unless a specific exception is
granted

- high risk changes will be considered on a case by case basis, if you
think that your change is "high risk", please hold off on it for now
unless it is really important.  if not sure, ask somebody.

- changes for abuild set -e support are not allowed at this time

- moving packages from testing to community are allowed for now, but
will be disallowed once the hard freeze is in place

A hard freeze in preparation for branching 3.6 will most likely begin
next week on Friday.  Once the branch has occured, the edge tree will
return back to a soft freeze status until the 3.6.0 release with the
ABI rule relaxed.

The testing repo only lives in the edge branch, and so is not subject
to any freezes.

William

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From: Natanael Copa <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2017 22:33:20 +0100

Hi,

On Thu, 23 Mar 2017 11:56:10 -0500

> We are imposing a soft freeze in edge for now, as part of preparation

I think we have to postpone the freeze a bit. However, we have had too
many breakages in short time. We need avoid breaking things now.

Here are some things we need to do before the freeze:

We need to look over the bugs in the bugtracker and try fix those that
we can and possibly decide if some needs to be moved to 3.7. Main point
here is that we don't a week before release find an issue that we had
forgotten that *must* go into the release. Basicaly we need sort the
issues in priority order.

We need freeze the toolchain and buildscripts very soon, because once
the builders for stable are up we don't want make changes in the way
packages are built (eg automatic package splitting and similar). We
should not have a package released that no longer builds due to abuild
behavior changed.

This also means that we cannot upgrade gcc major version at that point
so if we want new gcc, binutils, musl, then now is the time for that. I
am trying to coordinate with musl, which I think will make release
soonish.

We should also try have bigger things like llvm/clang upgraded now.

If there are any libs that will break ABI then we should bring those in
as soon as possible. We need libressl 2.5, but I'm not sure 2.5.x
is stable yet, nor do I know when it will be. (likely within a week or
two).

Basically, if there are any important ABI breaking changes that we want
in alpine 3.6, then now is the time to make that happen.

> - minor changes such as non-ABI breaking version bumps are still

I think the glib and gtk and friends are ok. They are normally ABI
backwards compatible. (I saw a pull request for glib, which i think we
should pull asap)

> nss-static change) are not allowed unless a specific exception is

This is in affect now. If you know that you have some important
restructuring, then now is the time for those. Don't assume that you
can do any package restructures in April.

> unless it is really important.  if not sure, ask somebody.

This is in effect now.

> - changes for abuild set -e support are not allowed at this time

This is in effect now. This means that we don't remove " || return 1"
yet. We don't revert those that already have been removed.

> will be disallowed once the hard freeze is in place

This means that we need to look over what we have in testing and if
there are important things there, then we need move those as soon as
possible over to community.

> return back to a soft freeze status until the 3.6.0 release with the

This it not how we do the branching. I'll clarify.

We don't branch until the v3.6.0 release is tagged. The reason for this
is that I want focus to be fixing things for the 3.6 release instead of
working on new features.

So from around middle of April we should do the hard freeze and try to
get the release out. Fix the bugs, polish etc.

> The testing repo only lives in the edge branch, and so is not subject

This is true, but I would prefer to see that people try fix what
currently is in testing and help move those to community instead of
adding more stuff to testing.

Thanks!

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