Alpha 2 -- help needed

[Simon Quigley]

Hey guys,

On 12/30/2016 01:41 AM, Valorie Zimmerman wrote:
> Hi folks, you might notice that we didn't have an Alpha 1 out today.
> That was partly because our packages aren't published and ready to go,
> and the other is that none of the other flavors were ready either.

(with the exception of Ubuntu Kylin, which wanted to participate but didn't step
up to coordinate)

> Or, perhaps they didn't want to do all that extra work. Because I've
> never been involved in releasing before, I didn't realize that "The
> community flavors that choose to release alpha milestones (and the
> beta-1 milestone) are responsible for finding the resources to make
> these milestones happen. In general, releases will not happen without
> volunteers."

Usually either someone from Lubuntu or Ubuntu MATE steps up, nobody seemed to do
so this time.

> The page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityMilestoneProcess says that
> "tasks need to be performed by someone with shell access to the image
> building machine or someone on the Ubuntu release team.

I don't think there's someone who has access that isn't on the release team (or
at the very minimum, Canonical's Ubuntu Foundations team).

> * Final publishing
> * Setting up the ISO tracker
> * Handling blocks & unblocks"
> 
> In addition, "Flavour release teams are responsible for ensuring their
> images get rebuilds when required if a global rebuild is not
> occurring" and "Collect any release note URLs from flavours that want
> to provide them,"  "Make sure all flavours have their images marked as
> ready before release day," "Prepare and send release announcement to
> ubuntu-devel-announce with a cc to ubuntu-release, " and "Be
> responsive on IRC."
> 
> Some of us should sign up to do some of these jobs, none of which I
> ever thought of!

I've done this before myself, I've done it with someone before to make sure I
have the process right, and I even taught someone else how. It's really not
something a team of people does (at least in my experience), unless the person
put on the signup sheet delegates. So I would discourage people from doing
random things on that list before talking to the person signed up to do it.

The release task signup page is available here:
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZestyZapus/ReleaseTaskSignup

Typically people put on this list are limited to release managers for flavors (I
haven't really seen anyone else on there, and it's a "rule of thumb") so
unfortunately it doesn't look like many people from here can do this. If you
look at that page, I put my name down for Beta 1 and I plan on completing the
milestone tasks on that date.

Please let me know if you have any questions, and hopefully this clears up some
confusion! :)

-- 
Simon Quigley
tsimonq2 at ubuntu.com
tsimonq2 on freenode and OFTC
5C7A BEA2 0F86 3045 9CC8
C8B5 E27F 2CF8 458C 2FA4