Dear Release Team members, Thank you for your excellent work in getting our Beta 2 out the door! :) The use of -proposed for the first time was very cool to see in action and made the Unity and late Kernel changes go a lot smoother than they would have otherwise. The new queue bot was very useful at keeping down the adrenaline as well. :)
Now that Beta 2 is out, and we're entering the last stretch before we put out the 12.04 LTS[1], there are a couple of things we need to figure out for the remainder of the month, especially on how we want to be managing the archive frozen period, and -proposed. A goal for this release is to have the image we produce at the start of the release candidate window be a true release candidate, and any images from final freeze on be potentially shippable. The schedules were earlier aligned to permit this, now its time to figure out rest of details... For the past 2 releases[2][3], we've kept the archive frozen after Beta 2 went out, until Final Freeze[4]. This time we've got two weeks until now and the Final freeze, so keeping it frozen and asking for review of all the bug fixes, etc. throughout would be a lot of work. On the other hand, if we want to be able to have TRUE release candidate image, a week before release, we need to start the hard choices about what fixes go in, and which ones go to SRUs, before the Final Freeze[4], based on past experiences. We also now have -proposed to leverage here, and experiment with as part of this. To mitigate risk, and make effective use of the release team's review cycles, I'd like to propose we try out the following for any packages in our seeded images (main+universe): now-4/5 - Archive stays open to bug fixes and approved FFes only. 4/5 - KernelFreeze[5], and archive goes into pre-release freeze state at 2100. Release team reviews all patches targetted to -release. SRUs can start to go into -proposed, and get reviewed at discretion of release team for opportunity inclusion into -release. 4/12 - Final Freeze[1] - ALL fixes should go into -proposed, and only copied into -release after review meeting. Full QA ISO testing run done at start, to identify problem cases. Release team meets daily for 1/2 hour at 1600 GMT in #ubuntu-release to figure out which fixes we want to include in overnight images, and determine who is best match for reviewing them for risk/upside, and copy vs. rebuild into -release. There should be no fixes being added, unless its a fix that a member of the release team specifically requests. Images continue to be built daily. All packages should be reviewed and built by 2300 GMT in -release, so they can be included in the nightly builds. 4/19 - CandidateWindowStarts[6] - from this point forward, any of images produced could be the final one. CRON job is disabled. The full set of QA results needs to be gathered on these images. Continue with daily release team meetings to agree if any additional fixes in -proposed MUST be included, and let QA teams know explicitly if another round of full manual testing is going to be needed. 4/26 - Ship it. Does this seem like a reasonable way to leverage -proposed? spread the release team review work to where it matters most and still accomplish goal? alternatives? Also, for those packages that are in unseeded universe, FFes and fixes will continue to be reviewed and accepted into -release until the FinalUnseededUniverseFreeze at April 24 at 0900 UTC (per earlier discussions [1]. Iain, Stefan, Stefano, Scott, Iulian - will one of you volunteer to be the focal point contact? Am assuming you all be using #ubuntu-motu to discuss/monitor unseeded universe during the time from when the archive freezes? Is this correct? Any other questions/issues/thoughts on the upcoming month? If the above seems reasonable I'll start updating the checklists[8] to reflect this, and working with the other teams to get us all coordinated. Thanks, Kate [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrecisePangolin/ReleaseSchedule [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricReleaseSchedule [3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NattyReleaseSchedule [4] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FinalFreeze [5] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelFreeze [6] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CandidateWindowStarts [7] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnseededUniverseFinalFreeze [8] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReleaseCandidateProcess -- Ubuntu-release mailing list Ubuntu-release@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-release