[cle-release-team] Sakai 2.9 release process

[May, Megan Marie]

Hi Beth, 
     Thanks for bringing off list discussion to the list.   Off list discussion is detrimental to transparency and community building.   Can you outline the road blocks that were preventing tagging and what was done to address them?  I'm not sure everyone on this team was included in that conversation. 

In your message you talk a lot about the 'release team'  needing to take action and make decisions.   I'm guessing that those that have stepped forward or have been assigned by their institution don't feel empowered.    Perhaps part of the time on Thursday can be spent talking with the team about owning this process.

Megan



-----Original Message-----
From: cle-release-team-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:cle-release-team-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Beth Kirschner
Sent: Monday, November 14, 2011 5:16 PM
To: cle-release-team at sakaiproject.org
Subject: [cle-release-team] Sakai 2.9 release process

I'd like to summarize some recent off-list discussions in an effort to move forward the Sakai 2.9 build & release process. But first, I think we need to not lose sight of the primary goal, which is to release 2.9 alpha/beta tags quickly and often. It's now mid-November and this release team has not directly released any tag. We've just removed several road-blocks to making this happen (thanks all!). I think the next steps is that the release team needs to take action, make decisions, and start putting out regular tagged releases for QA.  
Additionally, we need to decide on updated milestones for the 2.9 release, starting with when to branch. I'd like to suggest that we discuss _and_ make decisions no later than this Thursday's Release Team meeting that will result in the following:

1) a new alpha tag build started this week
2) a target date for the first branch and beta tag

Primary goal: Release 2.9 alpha/beta tags in a timely, efficient manner.

Secondary goals:
	* Clean up the release process enough to automate (at least most of) it
	* Rationalize kernel-util (initial testing of this proved successful)
	* Break calendar/assignments cross-dependency (SAK-21389 - fixed)
	* Break courier/presence cross-dependency (SAK-21397 -patch attached)
	* Rationalize kernel, entitybroker, common, edu-services and sakai- basic-tool, sakai-standard-tool, sakai-common-tool, sakai-edu-tool
	* Break awkward versioning/release constraints between kernel/ framework and indies
	* Explore using a real repository manager and automated build server
	* Balance doing the best possible thing, the smallest possible thing, and resources available (avoid partial/piecemeal/long transitions)

Remaining proposed work to achieve the primary goal is as follows:

1. Move kernel-util to shared.
2. Combine the base pom.xml and master/pom.xml into one, perhaps called sakai-parent (following the Jasig model for uPortal).
3. Possibly remove purepoms entirely, all indies then inherit from the sakai-parent pom.
4. If not 3, then collapse these into one pom, perhaps called sakai- indie or similar.
5. Migrate Entity broker into the kernel 6. Combine common and edu-services into  a single package

Additionally, we also discussed as a short term way forward to just start cutting [alpha] releases based off some revision of nightly.

Say if we wanted the next alpha to be next Tuesday, then what revision was Monday midnight (time zone of the source control server so EST) that would be the package what is deployed to QA servers. We could call next weeks
sakai-2.9.0-a02-2011-11-15 rXXXXXX

And just go with that until actual release candidates. Once we get there, the indie dependency tree won't have any cycles or other problems, we shouldn't have to rebuild all of the indies, and make it much easier to run the script to pump out a regular release.

The only downside is that regular people if they want the source won't be able to check out the alpha tag.


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