Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>]

stable-rc-0.8 has been branched in git and there is a tarball available.

The wiki page is: http://wiki.sourcemage.org/Stable-0.8

The chroot from 0.7 is
http://download.sourcemage.org/image/official/smgl-stable-0.7-basesystem-x86.tar.bz2
with sha512sum
ad0953fcb4673f9341ca7dd7e0f5191c9ef4a409245fbcd6efd74aaecd17b99bd35335187e7b8a49bde5e6795b3239638bd0af742f7f9510f9cbff2638014824
(I will upload a sig once I get the tarball onto my signing machine).  More
details on this chroot are below.

The target release date is 2007/03/11, two weeks from today.  George
Sherwood (p3pilot) is driving this one so ask him if you have any
questions.  Oddly we waited until the week after he got *back* to have him
do this instead of continuing our tradition of having someone do it while
they were gone.

At the last developer meeting we discussed some possible improvements for
this process, which were summarized in
<20070218023753.GI19436 AT shade.firinn.org> :

On Feb 17, Jeremy Blosser [jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org] wrote:
> Grimoire:
> - The accelerated release process is working, with some room for
>   improvement:
>   - It took us too long to get a chroot this time.  Updated chroots should
>     be available at the start of the release cycle.  This should be easy,
>     for some reason it isn't.  We can use the default configset stored in
>     the cauldron repository to seed chroots.  Those of us with better
>     testing hardware (vms, etc.) will try to get some solid chroots
>     established that can be better maintained between releases.

This chroot has been generated via a xen install of 0.9.6.1 (which was
stable-0.4) that was system-updated to 0.6 and then 0.7.  The full process
is documented, repeatable, and sustainable for future updates; I'll be
getting the docs up over the next few days.  This one has udev and
console-tools; I'll be making alternate ones that use static dev (with
console-tools) and kbd (with udev) so we can test those things that use
alternate providers.  It already has both grub and lilo since they don't
conflict.

In addition, 0.8 introduces the change that basesystem no longer depends on
nano, it depends on TEXT-EDITOR.  We talked about this a bit in
#sourcemage-grimoire and while no one thinks we should try to add every
possible editor to the list, it's probably not completely safe to just
stick to nano anymore.  I've added the other 3 editors that can be
installed on the ISO to the list as a minimal thing.  These are elvis, jed,
and vim.  If no one wants to pick these up I'll just do it so it doesn't
slow anything down.

>   - We could probably use some more time between release cycles to let
>     things settle a bit and focus on any development issues.  We will be
>     taking a week off between releasing 0.7 and starting 0.8 for this and
>     to make sure the chroot process is solid.  stable-rc-0.8 will be
>     branched on Feb 25.

Done.

>   - We can streamline the basesystem testing a bit.  We will add a column to
>     the wiki release tracking pages for an extra X that anyone who
>     successfully casts the spell as part of a full system upgrade can add.
>     IF the shepherd of a spell hasn't signed off on that spell by the
>     release but doesn't have any gating bugs noted on the wiki and someone
>     else has indicated it does cast, the spell is signed off for the
>     release.  We will also add another column to indicate that the initial
>     research for any known gating bugs has been completed.  Make sure you
>     are accurately noting issues and progress with your spells.

These are done on the 0.8 testing page, and I've put up a template for
future releases at http://wiki.sourcemage.org/Stable_Release_Template

One more thing, I have added a VERSION file to the grimoire root that
contains a version-branch|patchlevel string, eg 0.9-test or 0.8-rc or
0.7-13.  The last is for updates to stable after it is released.  In
addition, the tarball generation scripts will cat the current git head
commit id for the given branch into this file before tarring it all up.
This should help us figure out which release a user is on when they report
a bug.

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