David,
(Replying to the Tomcat users@ list)
On 4/28/22 08:45, David Cleary wrote:
Hi Chris. We have spoken over the years at various Apachecons. In one of
your presentations, you talked about smoke testing Tomcat pre-releases.
We just got bitten by a regression in 9.0.62, and the team that is
responsible for updating it is interested in the details on doing this.
Can you give me details on where we would pick up pre-release builds and
what mailing list we should monitor and report any issues.
Sure.
Briefly, the release process goes like this[1]:
1. Announce intent to do a release on dev@ mailing list; call for any
last-minute commits or conversations. This often doesn't happen because
we have a release-cadence that follows a rough schedule of
prep-and-release around the beginning of each month.
2. Tag the release + prepare a release candidate build. This is a formal
process which results in a vote.
3. Declare a vote on Tomcat x.y.z for a [VOTE] thread posted to the dev@
mailing list. Here is your opportunity to give feedback on the release.
(See below). Information about where to get the release candidates is
available in that [VOTE] message.
4. Assuming the [VOTE] passes, the release is promoted from "candidate"
to "official release", distributed to mirrors, and announced.
So, how can you participate in #3 above?
Well, the release candidate includes all the binary artifacts from a
regular release, so you can use it just as you would usually use a
"real" release. You can also build it from source as you always could, etc.
The "Getting Started Hacking Tomcat" presentation[2] contains some
information about how to build from source, run the unit-tests, etc. if
you'd like some guidance.
If you find a bug and are able to contribute a test-case for us to
include in our test process, that would be great: it will prevent the
bug from coming-back as a regression in the future.
Simply reply to the [VOTE] thread with any concerns you may have, or, if
everything is great, we'd love to have your "+1 to release" vote as
well. Technically speaking, non-PMC-members don't have a binding vote,
but I have never seen a vote move-forward in spite of legitimate
negative community feedback. If something is wrong with the release,
we'll cancel it, the fix issue, and repeat the process with a new
release candidate (and version number).
Let us know if you have any questions.
-chris
[1] Subject to the whims of the release managers, who are -- remember --
unpaid volunteers
[2] https://tomcat.apache.org/presentations.html
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