[sakai-pmc] Summary of today's Sakai Release team meeting

[Anthony Whyte]

Java knowledge (at a minimum) and an understanding of Sakai code practices are also pre-requisites in my view.  Fluency in Sakai Jira practices and subversion commands, while necessary, does not fully encompass the role or its responsibilities.  Indeed, if all that is required is adherence to the three bullets points listed below then I suggest that we dispense with the role entirely, simplify the process, and let committers merge their fixes directly to the target branch as necessary.

anthony whyte | its and mlibrary | university of michigan | arwhyte at umich.edu | 517-980-0228


On Feb 7, 2014, at 4:20 PM, Neal Caidin wrote:

> Hi Max,
> 
> One of the experienced branch managers gave me this information:
> 
> Branch Manager (minimal requirements)
> - Use jira (and occasionally email/skype) to verify which issues are necessary and appropriate to merge to the Maintenance Branch.
> - Merge the issue. (If the merge isn't clean, contact the CLE Team for assistance.)
> - Set the Maintenance Branch's status field to "Resolved" and set the Fix Version to the appropriate maintenance branch version.
> 
> Requires knowledge of jira, subversion. Ideally can perform minor conflict resolution. Also ideally can attend the Thursday release call. 
> 
> Average probably about 4 hours a week. (About 5 minutes per issue)
> 
> 
> -- I am guessing we could also provide mentorship for this role, though would want to confirm that before making any commitment :-) .
> If you need more technical details or requirements we could probably drill down a little. For example, merging issues implicitly means that a strong command of Subversion (svn) and access to our subversion repository is required. Not everyone is granted access to the subversion repository but if you could have a good candidate, we would look into it, of course. :-)
> 
> Thanks!
> Neal
> 
>> 	Max Whitney	February 7, 2014 at 3:24 PM
>> Hello Neal:
>> 
>> Can you identify the duties of a branch manager, as well as an estimate of the amount of time required, over what duration? This will help us assess whether we can contribute someone. 
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Max
>> 
>> 
>> 	Neal Caidin	February 6, 2014 at 5:08 PM
>> [ to sakai-pmc and Sakai release team] 
>> 
>> Summary of today's release call [1] : 
>> ------------------------------------------------------------ 
>> * We would like to proceed with branching Sakai 10 as soon as possible. The main to-dos before branching are to make Elastic Search the default search tool and the to-do's outlined by Anthony in his email, which are : 
>> 
>> TODO for contrib tools Signup Tool, Delegated Access, and Roster2 ... plus dependencies [copy/pasted from Anth's email] 
>> 1.  Migrate projects from contrib to core (svnadmin dump, retain history) 
>> 2.  Update <scm> paths once projects are in core  - Anthony 
>> 3.  Fold Jira contrib projects into SAK - Anthony 
>> 
>> * Matt Jones is investigating TODO #1  . 
>> 
>> * AsahiNet is working on the Elastic Search default issue [2]. 
>> 
>> * Neal will send out a lazy consensus proposal outlining the plan to proceed with Sakai 10 branching to the sakai-dev list . 
>> 
>> * We reviewed the rest of the blockers, the ones we did not review on the meeting last week. The team noted that we have a bit of a categorization problem in Jira. In an ideal scenario, anything assigned a priority of blocker, would be a true blocker for the release. But that is not the case. Today we used a combination of demoting some items to critical, using labels on some blockers to make it clear that they should not hold up Sakai 10, and leaving some as blockers for now, recognizing that while we would like them to get done for Sakai 10, they might not truly block the release. A fraction of the issues seem to be true blockers, for which we would not release Sakai 10.  Note: We should be thinking of ways of cleaning up how we manage blocker/criticals in a more consistent way (maybe a topic for a Community Coordinator/PMC discussion?). 
>> 
>> * We still need to identify Sakai 10 branch managers. Any volunteers?  Once we have Sakai 10 branch managers, Sakai 2.9.x seems likely only to receive critical patches unless some folks from the community stand up and volunteer. We would need a critical mass of qa testers and branch managers for merging and bug fixers to have a 2.9.x community supported release beyond 2.9.3 . At the moment, I'm not aware of such critical mass for 2.9.x . 
>> 
>> * Edia Skin manager did not make it into Sakai 10, but there is potential it could make it into a Sakai 10.x or Sakai 11. 
>> 
>> * Kind of a minor note: I mentioned on the call that I think we need a change process so that if after branching some feature emerges as a candidate for Sakai 10.0, now that the scope is frozen, there is a way someone could propose the feature be added and the Sakai Release team and/or PMC could evaluate the risk/benefits and any potential impact to the schedule to make a determination. By default, there would be no new items, but we know from experience that this does happen sometimes, so it would be good to be prepared. 2 cents. 
>> 
>> [1] Release team notes - http://etherpad.ctools.org/rmmt-2014-02-06 
>> 
>> [2] https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SRCH-130 
>> 
>> Thanks, 
>> Neal 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Neal Caidin
> Sakai Community Coordinator
> Apereo Foundation
> neal.caidin at apereo.org
> Skype me! (but let me know in advance for the first interaction) - nealkdin
> 
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