[Koha-devel] About Release process

[Paul Poulain]

Le 12/07/2012 10:53, Paul Poulain a écrit :
> Hello koha-devel,
> I have some points to rise about our release process.

OK, we spoke of this during our IRC meeting. I also spoke of this with
Jared, that applied as RM for 3.12 (he's not elected yet, but I suspect
he will be the only one fool enough to apply ;-) )

And a 3rd option has been risen, I think it's the one we will use.

What I/we plan to do:
* 2 months before the release (number N) =
    - declare small feature freeze: only bugfixes and small/non-core
enhancement are pushed for the next release
    - branch the release on git. master goes his way for N+1, major ENH
can be pushed here. N is still controlled by the RM, N-1 controlled by
the RMaint
* 1 month before the release =
    - declare string freeze: no more string changes to let translators
do their work

By "are pushed" I really mean the freeze is about *pushing* before the
freeze. In previous releases, we've accepted some ENH provided they've
been *submitted* before the freeze. That's an important change, be
careful ! If we want stability, we need more time to test.

There is another positive aspect with this refinement of the workflow =
the documentation writers will have more time to write the
documentation: 2 months before the release, they'll be sure there won't
be major enhancements/change pushed.

Last (but not least) point:
 * August is holiday time for Northern hemisphere, and oct22 minus 2
months = Aug 22, that's a problem. That's why I propose to switch to
may/november for our releases.
The timeline would be:
 * today => sept 22 => hack ! hack ! hack !
 * sept 22 => feature freeze, no more large or core enhancements pushed
(whatever the date of submission of the patch)
 * oct 22 => string freeze, no more string changes
 * nov 22 => Koha 3.10 (and I'm no more RM. Yippee !!! :D :D )

The only bad thing with this method is that it gives more work to the
RM, that must push on 2 branches for 2 months. But for 2012-11 release,
that's not a problem, as we will have 2 different RMs ;-)
-- 
Paul POULAIN
http://www.biblibre.com
Expert en Logiciels Libres pour l'info-doc
Tel : (33) 4 91 81 35 08