[sakai2-tcc] Thoughts on 2.9.1 schedule

[Matthew Jones]

TL;DR - Release process is too complex, local issues are part of the delay,
perhaps we should just skip release candidates for minor releases like we
did in the past and put out 2.9.1.

I haven't caught up in depth on this is entire thread as this is my first
day back from Phoenix and still jet lagged. However nobody who commented
besides Neal regularly puts any predictable effort into the actual release
process. And as far as the process of actually cutting the release and
merging the tickets, myself and Sam currently do the vast majority of that
work. So the schedule is very dependent on our local workload. This week I
was out almost all week catching up doay, and Sam will be out most of next
week, putting some extra local pressure on me. Some of these delays are
built into the overly padded schedule that we've kept Neal updated on.

However some of the padding is just because of the actual known difficulty
and anticipated delays from the past 3 months in the time required to
perform the actual release and getting people on-board with the QA effort
when needed so we're ready for the next cycle. We could smoke test on
nightly and just skip rc01 going straight to 2.9.1 and for sure save a lot
of time cutting the schedule in half. This was what we did in the past for
previous minor releases (2.7.1, 2.8.1, 2.8.2), just verifying if the
software actually starts up.

Some known delays and thoughts.

- CLE Release Team currently all meet once every Thursday morning, which
generally puts at *least* a week between making any actual decisions. We
could make decisions via email asynchronously with time limits, but this
doesn't necessarily mean things will happen faster. We could potentially
meet more often when the release is about to happen, but it's difficult to
time times where all interested parties can meet.

- Currently, as mentioned, Sam and I are important to the process of both
branching and releasing. We're happy to distributed this more but the only
person who's done any major branching lately is Greg at IU, though not
consistently, and he's seems busier now. 2.9 has 63 issues waiting to
merge, 2.8 has 65, most of these verified. Most of these will be pushed to
2.9.2 or 2.9.3 even though they're probably good fixes.  Steve Swinsburg
does help on the releases (especially 2.8), but he hasn't done a full
release of 2.9.

- The release process for 2.9 in general is overly complex. When Anthony
was releasing we had half of the tools set up as indies as we do now and
everything was done on command line. Now it's all done through Jenkins. The
idea with this is it would make it easier for other people to do off cycle
releases (Like Bryan does occasionally since I've showed him how to do it
last year at the conference, and Steve does occasionally) but really just
introduces random complexity because the Jenkins M2 Release Plugin has a
lot of bugs, and Maven still has a lot of missing capability as well.
  There's going to need to be a separate email addressing this, but I'm
almost reluctant to do *any* releases both because of the actual time it
takes (2-3 hours one day, waiting ~8 hours for Jenkins, then 2-3 hours the
next day) as well as the confusion it ends up causing those who use msub to
customize builds and anyone who uses the 2.9.x branch. When versions get
bumped, the SNAPSHOT version also gets dumped which REQUIRES that change be
pushed through the entire local code-base. When Jenkins updates it often
does something new and unpredictable each release cycle that I get to
experience and attempt to figure out! Great fun! :)

Much of this is stuff we'd like to have Neal do, and it's part of his 3+
month on-boarding, but it really requires him to go some where and get
training from someone that knows it (or someone coming to him). Doing this
over Skype isn't very convenient.  I have plans for this to happen (If I'm
going to be training again) by at least April. Though I'm not sure with the
way the release process works and the randomness of Jenkins that it would
be possible for someone who doesn't have a lot of experience
troubleshooting maven errors (Something I've wrangling with years) would be
able to solve easily.

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 8:27 AM, Neal Caidin <nealcaidin at sakaifoundation.org
> wrote:

> Yes, no new blockers regressions, and have a fairly high bar for a show
> stopper. I haven't checked this morning to see if they have been
> fixed/merged, but we do have a few security issues that possibly won't get
> done in time.
>
> I'm at EuroSakai the week of Jan 28, that might make the coordination
> tricky. Unlike Educause where I was barely a blip, I expect I will be
> getting a lot of attention in Paris and will be hard pressed to find time
> for QA coordination/check-in. Would be nice to have a backup QA lead, but I
> don't.
>
> So maybe the schedule range is more of the first or second week in
> February. But if we need an RC02, then that schedule fails, correct? And I
> need to have a QA lead/check in backup plan. If I don't have that, it could
> delay things a week and we are back to a mid-February.
>
> - Neal
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai2-tcc/attachments/20130118/df71561f/attachment.html