[WG: Sakai QA] Oct 31 update - Re: Daily update - Re: 2.9.0 release scheduled for next Friday, Nov 2 [tentative]

[Neal Caidin]

[QA, Dev, TCC, and CLE release email groups]

Hi All,

Sorry for not getting an update out yesterday. Maybe a daily update was too ambitious of a goal, but with the potential of the release being days away, I'll do my best to keep you informed as often as possible. I still think we could be days away from a final release and hopefully will have CLE 2.9.0-rc03 (release candidate 03), available for testing this Friday.

Here is what needs to happen, as I understand it:

Governance
----------------------
* Thursday, November 1 - the CLE release team needs to agree that we are ready to release 2.9.0. That recommendation goes to the TCC (Technical Coordination Committee)
* Monday, November 5 - the TCC needs to approve the release.  The TCC has three days from the time of the CLE recommendation, hence the coming Monday or Tuesday.

Technical and QA
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* There are a couple of potential blockers for 2.9.0 .  They are being actively discussed/examined/worked on by the CLE release team.
* RC03 was delayed, at least in part, by Hurricane Sandy (impact to folks working on the release!),  but in truth we probably needed another day or two to examine the issues anyway
* RC03 seems likely it will be out this Thursday night/ Friday morning. That could change.
* Bottom line is that 
                      1) We are days, not weeks, away from a release, if the CLE release team and TCC agree
                      2) Once RC03 is released we could use as much QA testing help as possible in a very short time, to verify the release and let it move to GA (production) status. So if you have any flexibility to pay attention to RC03 and help test, that would be a huge huge (grandísimo) help. 
* After RC03 becomes production, even if there are no changes needed,  it is not just a renaming exercise. A new build has to be made, so it will be at least a couple of days after all these activities before 2.9.0 is officially built.

I'll be at Educause next week, so coordinating QA testing may be tricky, especially if we don't finish RC03 by this Friday. Also it is not clear to me exactly how much QA testing we will need for RC03. Since we have had a couple of rounds of regression, it might be more of a sanity check / reviewing some Jira bug fixes, so perhaps a day will be sufficient. Any help and advice is welcome, especially help :-).

Regards,


Neal Caidin

Sakai CLE Community Coordinator
nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org
Skype: nealkdin
AIM: ncaidin at aol.com