Thinking about Bazaar 2.1.0b2 and 2.0.2 releases

[Ian Clatworthy]

John Arbash Meinel wrote:

> According to https://edge.launchpad.net/bzr/+milestone/2.1.0b2
> 2.1.0b2 is supposed to be released on 2009-10-28, or in roughly 2 weeks.
> This is mostly because we are quite a bit behind with 2.1.0b1, which was
> supposed to release approx 2 weeks ago.

Sounds fine to me. There are a lot of merges in the queue which ought to
land in the next 2 weeks.

> I'm hoping we already have features interesting enough for a release,
> since my StaticTuple code has landed. (The code to expose it to BTree
> should be landing ~ now.)
> 
> I expect that I'll have at least 1 or 2 more memory focused patches
> within the next week. Which means that 2.1.0b2 might have a rather
> significant overall improvement in peak memory and performance. (I'm
> targetting approx 50% peak memory, or 400MB instead of 800MB branching
> launchpad.)

Mega cool. I'm also *really* keen to get my patch for content filtering
landed. Hopefully someone can help me get it through review? Pretty
please? See
https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~ian-clatworthy/bzr/eol-update-bug/+merge/10959

> Having done the 2.0.1 and 2.1.0b1 releases concurrently, I'm tempted to
> say that we should continue to do so. My main motivation is that
> managing NEWS is a PITA. Having duplicate copies of entries is confusing
> and causes difficulties during merge. Especially once you get a conflict
> and you want to try to sort out what goes where.
> 
> My vote is that whenever we get to the point of wanting to do a 2.1.0*
> release, we should make a 2.0.* release unless there are 0 bugfixes
> landed.

+1 from me. We may want to release a 2.0.x without a beta at the same
time but not the other way around IMO.

> So at this point, we need to decide who we want as RM (I'm willing,
> since I'm still a bit in RM mode, though I'm happy for someone else to
> do the work.)

I'd like to see continuity here so I believe you ought to be the RM for
at least the next round, if not the one after that too.

> Oh, and there is one point I'm still not sure about for a release. What
> things go as part of the "official announcement" and what bits are done
> right away. For example, do we update the website when it has 'gone
> gold' or do we wait for installers? Do we update 'SourceDownloads' but
> not the new website?

Good questions. IMO, here are the minimum requirements before making the
announcement:

1. the tar.gz available from SourceDownloads
2. the Windows installers available from WindowsDownloads

Highly desirable things are:

3. the PPA updated
4. the Mac OS X installer available from MacOSXDownloads
5. the documentation rebuilt
6. packages for other OSs ready

I'm personally not a fan of waiting indefinitely for 3-6. I'd prefer to
see us give people 48 hours to do them after going gold. If not done by
then, we should announcement anyway IMO as long as 1 and 2 are done.
(I'll rebuild the documentation today fwiw.)

Btw, we're planning to use templating to regenerate the website to
automatically include announcements made on LP. Until that's done, the
website should be updated either just before or just after making the
announcement.

Ian C.