Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Seth Alan Woolley <seth AT positivism.org>]

=== stable grimoire updating process ===

We have three main grimoires, devel, test, and stable:

  * devel contains all spells plus works-in-progress, identified by a 
    WIP file in them.

  * test contains all spells that should work but haven't had gauranteed 
    testing.  The guru's intent is that, yes, this spell, to the best of 
    my knowledge, will work as well as the previous versions.  If not, 
    it goes in devel with a WIP.

  * stable should have been well-tested.

For our purposes, those are our axiomatic definitions of each grimoire.  
To resolve debates about what should be in whatever grimoire, those are 
our definitions.  I have final say, of course, besides GL and PL, who 
out-rank me in this matter.

To get between devel and test grimoire, we have gurus, each guru is 
responsible for their own decisions here.  Final call goes to the 
grimoire team lead (I have no place here) if there is any debate.

To get between test and stable grimoire, immediately after each stable 
release, the test grimoire shall be immediately forked off into a 
"stable-rc" grimoire.  RC means "Release Candidate".  Prometheus and 
other testers should be testing stable-rc grimoire to make sure one can 
update from stable to stable-rc safely and relatively painlessly.  What 
I mean about "painlessly" follows:

  * Version updates that break apis shouldn't do too much damage here, but 
    there's only so much we can do about that.  This should be documented.

  * Any known issues about updating should be documented prior to the 
    stable release and packages as "release notes".

  * All bugs that exist in stable-rc grimoire but not stable grimoire 
    should be fixed before release.  If they show up afterwards, we must 
    either wait until the next release to fix that or if it is of a high 
    enough priority, they should be integrated into stable.

  * Disputes about what goes into stable are decided by any person I 
    delegate, myself, GL, and PL, in that order.
    
If that's good enough, I'd like comments and volunteers for people to 
run on prometheus on stable-rc grimoire when I've fixed it up a bit.

=== stable grimoire versioning ===

To better track issues, the stable grimoire should have versions.  They 
will be done like so:

There will be three parts to the stable grimoire version:

  * MAJOR VERSION: This shall be "0" at first, and changed only for 
    major ISO releases.
  
  * MINOR VERSION: This shall be incremented, starting at "0", for each 
    stable release between ISO releases.
  
  * REVISION: This shall be incremented whenever security updates or 
    major bugfixes are integrated into stable grimoire between QA declares 
    the release official.  It starts at zero.

Each version number shall reset all inferior version numbers when they 
are incremented.

We will start at 0.0.0 stable release (I know, cool).  When a security 
update is applied, it shall be 0.0.1.  When a stable-rc is made stable, 
it will be 0.1.0, and a security update on that would be 0.1.1, and so 
on, until the next ISO is released, which will make it 1.0.0.

=== ISO release process ===

To better follow ISO development, the ISO process itself will be 
recreated for each stable grimoire release.  If there are any major 
issues with the ISO after one week of testing, it will continue with -rc 
status.  So all ISOs will have -rc designation at first.  When no known 
bugs exist for the ISO, it will be released as -rc still and aliased as 
a major stable ISO after one week of community testing with no 
additional bug reports and a release notes list of issues that are 
acceptable to the QA TL, the ISO TL, and the PL, the PL of course able 
to override any decision here.

Lately I've been working on trying to get the ISO build process 
documented and somewhat usable by filing an enormous amount of bugs 
against the proj3 branch (which is our current devel branch).  When 
that's sane enough, I'll integrate it into the grimoire release process 
as I mention in the paragraph above.  (I spent all weekend on this, so I 
apologize for not jumping on the stable grimoire release process like I 
should have that warranted the questions to the grimoire in a previous 
thread).  FYI, the build process is distinct from future work on the 
next-generation installer, of course (being worked on somewhat 
separately).

So again, any comments?

Seth

-- 
Seth Alan Woolley [seth at positivism.org], SPAM/UCE is unauthorized
Key id 00BA3AF3 = 8BE0 A72E A47E A92A 0737  F2FF 7A3F 6D3C 00BA 3AF3
Quality Assurance Team Leader; Security Team Member, Leader Emeritus
Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic http://www.sourcemage.org
Elected Coordinating Committee Member, Secretary, and Finances Chair
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