[ANN] What with all these releases ?

[Vincent Ladeuil]

Hi all,

You may wonder if the new Release Manager has gone bersek with all those
announcements, so I'd like to explain the background here.

We are about to release 2.3b1 and I wanted to cleanup a byt our stack of
bugfixes landed on the 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 series. There is valuable work
waiting to reach our users here.

So I started with 2.0.6 and went up from there.

2.3b1 is not yet released due to a minor technical problem but it will
not take more revisions from lp:bzr after revno 5432
revid:pqm at pqm.ubuntu.com-20100917142727-49blehg006i4nc9n

So as far as developers are concerned, all series except for 2.3 are
still opened and can be targeted by merge proposals.

But this means we will now be maintaining 4 concurrent series and that
seems both, too much and requiring some coordinated actions ;)

I've setup a few wiki pages to track what needs to be done. If you
intend to participate by building an installer or more generally
packaging for any platform, you're very welcome to to chime in.

http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/Releases/2.0.6
http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/Releases/2.1.3
http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/Releases/2.2.1
http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/Releases/2.3b1

The goal is to have all installers/packages ready and tested in 5 days
from now, i.e. 2010-09-23 so we can make an official announcement Friday
24 September 2010 08:00 UTC.

We'll adjust the date/hour if needed (well, the Release Manager will,
aka, your humble servant) , but it's generally best to set one and try
to stick to it ;)

Apart from the wiki pages above, I'd like to discuss a few proposals
with developers, packagers and installer builders.

1) Future releases

a) 2.0 will be supported until at least September 2010.

Gosh, that's today already :)

I've planned 2.0.7 to be released on 2011-03-10. This will probably be
the last 2.0 release. As such only critical bug fixes should be
targeted here.

b) 2.1 will be supported until at least February 2011

I've planned 2.1.4 to be released on 2010-11-18.

Should we support it until March 2011 instead of February, just to have
clear 6 months boundaries ? I've modified
https://edge.launchpad.net/bzr/2.1 anyway, feel free to disagree :)

c) 2.2 will be supported until at least September 2011.

2) Installers

I think the priority should be to release, in order of preference:
- 2.2.1
- 2.3b1 (source availble rsn, I swear)
- 2.1.3
- 2.0.6

For 2.1.3 and 2.0.6, I wonder if we should wait for user input though,
given the complexity and the scarce resources, may be we can delay them.

We can discuss it here (on the list) and summarize on the wiki page.

3) packaging (including SRU and ppas)

This is mainly for debian and Ubuntu (I don't forget gentoo, FreeBSD and
the others, but I'm less clear about the workflow there and whether
several series are maintained or only a stable one, which would be 2.2
in this case).

I know Max Bowsher has done a lot in this area but I'm unclear about
exactly what, and what we need to do now. So, feedback welcome here.

Apart from updating the ppas (bzr-beta, bzr-proposed and bzr) here are
the minimal actions we need to do for Ubuntu (based on
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=bzr&searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all&section=all):

- karmic-updates needs 2.0.6,
- lucid/lucid-updates ? needs 2.1.3
- maverick needs 2.2.1 (SRU)

Happy packaging !

        Vincent