[ This is the draft of the email I'm planning to send to desktop-devel,
and publish on Discourse. Feedback is very much welcome. ]
Hi all;
the 3.34 release is out of the door, but before we go into the 3.35
development cycle, the release team would like to kindly ask **all**
GNOME maintainers to send an email to release-team@gnome.org (and
possibly Cc: distributor-l...@gnome.org) every time their project(s)
introduce a new dependency, or update the version requirement. The
announcement is especially important for dependencies hosted outside of
gitlab.gnome.org.
## How does an announcement look like?
A simple email with:
- the name of the dependency
- the minimum required version of the dependency
- the source code repository of the dependency and the branch/tag to be
used -OR-
- the location of the release archive, possibly with the size and
SHA256 checksum of the release
sent to release-team@gnome.org will suffice.
As a friendly notice to the downstream distributors of GNOME modules,
you may also want to Cc: distributor-l...@gnome.org.
## Why is this necessary?
GNOME releases are built from [gnome-build-meta][1] recipes; if a new
dependency is introduced, or if the minimum requirement gets updated,
the build will fail until the recipe is updated; and, in the case of new
dependencies, until a new recipe is written and tested.
Failed builds block everything:
- the CD pipeline that generates the Flatpak run times for CI
- the release pipeline
- in the future, it'll also block the build of installable VMs
This means that a broken build is going to make the life of everyone
else in the project harder.
As builds take a lot of time to complete, it might happen that the
breakage introduced by a new dependency will go unnoticed for a while;
on top of that, it requires the release team to go and hunt down the
dependencies repositories, tarballs, or release archives.
## I already have to update the CI, I might forget to send an email
It's understandable: we do have a large infrastructure, so it might
happen that you forget something. Ideally, if you're updating your
custom CI, you're also going to have time to send a very short email to
a mailing list.
## Can I update gnome-build-meta myself?
Of course! Open a merge request[2] against gnome-build-meta, and the
release team will be happy to review it and merge it.
## Is this mandatory?
Currently, we want to be flexible with maintainers, so this requirement
is not going to be enforced; this is also why it's an *announcement*.
If builds keep breaking during 3.35 because of new/updated dependencies,
the release-team might start considering something more binding, like
pinning modules to previously released tags/versions; if that proves to
be impossible due to module interdependencies, we might very well end up
reverting commits in the offending module(s).
On behalf of the release-team,
Emmanuele.
[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta
[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/merge_requests
_______________________________________________
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https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team
Release-team lurker? Do NOT participate in discussions.