When to announce a release

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Ben Finney wrote:
> Gordon Tyler <gordon at doxxx.net> writes:
> 
>> I realize that the people who build the installers don't have a lot of
>> spare time, but for the majority of bzr users the release is the
>> binary installer. To my mind, there's no point in announcing bzr 2.0.3
>> unless the binary installers are ready.
> 
> I disagree with that. The release of a new version of Bazaar is a single
> event, and is significant in that the object represented by that version
> will no longer be changing from that point forward.
> 
> Binary installers for a specific version are separate, and do not all
> appear at the same time. For users of Debian “testing”, for instance,
> the release of 2.0.3 means that we'll have it available to install some
> time up to a few months later :-) That's a significant event, but is a
> separate event from the release of the Bazaar code at version 2.0.3.
> 
> Moreover, the two events (release of Bazaar at version X, availability
> of binary installers for Bazaar version X) are necessarily serial: the
> latter must wait for the former, and until the former happens there's
> only so much people can do to assist the latter.
> 
> If you like, you could consider the release of Bazaar version X as a
> starting gun: it drops the barrier to providing assistance to the
> creators of your favourite binary installer :-)
> 

Our official policy is that we announce "gone gold" on bazaar@ when the
release manager has created the tarballs. Then we send "Released" to
bazaar-announce@ when binary installers are available. At the moment,
*I* am both the Release Manager and the Windows build master. Which has
a benefit in that I can just allocate time and do them both in a row.

However, I don't build the .debs for ~bzr or ~bzr-beta-ppa, nor do I
build the Mac OS X packages.

For those who didn't notice, I *still* haven't sent the 2.0.2 + 2.1.0b3
officially available message, even though I'm packaging 2.0.3 and
2.1.0b4 today.

Having a lag in the official announcement just gives a big window where
the process can fail. (And has rather spectacularly in my case.) We've
had problems with docs not getting built in time to get the installers
built (which we've changed to say we don't wait for it.) I don't
remember what specifically prevented me from announcing 2.1.0b3, there
was something that slowed me down, and I haven't had the desire to
finish it up. I'm hoping to turn around 2.0.3+2.1.0b4 within 2 days, to
avoid that 'ran out of steam' effect this time.


I guess, on the ppa front, none of the 2.1 series has been packaged yet.
And we certainly don't plan on waiting 4 months to announce when we are
on a monthly release cycle... :)

John
=:->

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