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This page is part of the wiki materials for the top-level Apache Avalon project. We use the wiki for brainstorming, maintainance of a FAQ, a free-for-all link database, and lots of miscellaneous snippets. See UsingAvalonWiki for more detail.

How to be an Avalon Release Manager

This howto takes you through the steps of successfully handling the avalon release process. Its currently a kind of bulletted no-nonsense thing, but anyone should be able to follow.

Who can be a Release Manager?

Anyone. You don't even need to be a committer. But you do need someone with an account to the relevant machine (currently daedalus.apache.org / www.apache.org, will become minotaur.apache.org / www.apache.org / cvs.apache.org) to do the actual upload of the releases.

The process, step by step

1. Get up to speed on the basics

you need to know about our technical infrastructure and the tools available to you:

http://www.apache.org/dev/

Our releases go to http://www.apache.org/dist/avalon/, which is organised in accordance to the mandatory Mirroring Guidelines and in addition is usuable as a maven repository. You get them there by copying them securely using an SSH client (the scp tool in OpenSSH, or SecureFX, or pscp from the putty suite, or any number of other clients).

2. Get a general sense of subproject direction

Is anyone planning a big refactoring of the stuff you want to release? What is everyone's opinion on the quality of that material? What do people want to do with it? Find the answers to these questions one way or another. Usually a mailing list thread will do.

3. Get people to accept you as the release manager

This is usually not a lot of hassle and subject to lazy consensus, but make your intentions known. Can be tied in with item 4 below.

4. Draft a release plan

Decide on how you want to handle the release process. And write that up. You might want to create a stable branch in cvs, use a tracker such as jira to assign bugs to a particular release, etc etc. Or you might want to not do any of that and simply keep a long list of mailing list thread references on a wiki page. But figure that out.

Also, get a general idea of how many release candidates will be neccessary, how you will call them and what 'milestones' you will associate with those release candidates. Write all that up, but don't worry about being overly precise.

Release plan example

{{{ subject: Avalon-Dagger Release Plan

5. Build Release Candidates

We like to name our release candidates ${blah}-${version}-RC#, where ${blah}-${version} will be the final name of the distribution and -RC# is the release candidate identifier (so, for example avalon-dagger-1.2-RC1, avalon-dagger-1.2-RC2, avalon-dagger-1.2-RC3, etc). However, don't name the actual distributions like that; give those the final name (so, avalon-dagger-1.2). Just put them in a place where it is clear they are release candidates and not final (ie, http://cvs.apache.org/~johndoe/release-candidates and *not* http://www.apache.org/dist/avalon/).

To build a release candidate, simply follow the normal build procedure (a cvs update, a build cleanup, followed by a distribution build). That may look like:

{{{ cd ~/cvs/avalon/dagger/

6. Sign the files

You need to use GnuPG or a similar tool to sign the releases. Since many people are not used to PGP signing tools, a lot more extensive info is at /SigningReleases.

7. Tag cvs

To keep track of how you built what release and to be able to reconstruct a particular release candidate later, you should tag the cvs. This is really simple. Here's a sample command:

{{{ cd ~/cvs/avalon/dagger/

you can learn more about the 'tag' command by issueing the

 cvs -H tag 

command. In order to make sense out of CVS tags, we follow a consistent tag format that replaces all '.' and '-' with a '_' (cvs only allows 0-9A-Za-z_ for tag names, no '.'), starts with a capital letter, is otherwise lowercase, and replaces any 'RC#' with either 'a#' or 'b#'. So

{{{ Cornerstone_1_0_a1

are valid examples.

8. make the candidate files available

Upload the files to your chosen public location. For example:

{{{ cd ~/cvs/avalon/dagger/target/distributions

which are bash (unix/linux/cygwin) commands using OpenSSH. But you can use graphical tools like SecureFX as well if you like.

9. Announce the release candidate

Ideally, you can get a team of beta testers to try out every release candidate to make sure no bugs creep in. Get their attention by posting an announcement to the user and the development mailing list.

Example Announcement

{{{ subject:ann[Dagger] Release Candidate 1 available

10. Rinse and repeat

Keep building release candidates until you think your stuff is good to go.

11. Call for a PMC vote

(Mostly) for legal reasons, the Avalon PMC must vote on all releases. Anyone can call for a vote though. If the release process went well, this should be mostly a formality. Note that you don't have to be on the PMC (or even a committer) to initiate this vote. Note you will always need to get a PMC member to administer the vote

Example call to vote

{{{ subject: [PMC:VOTE] Avalon-Dagger Release

12. Administer the vote

Votes are open for a week, normally (or until majority is attained). Count and publish the results.

Example vote result

{{{ subject: [PMC:VOTE-RESULT] Avalon-Dagger Release

[" 10 "] +1 (for) [" 3 "] ±0 (abstain) [" 2 "] -1 (against)

13. Distribute the files

copy the release candidate to the appropriate location on the distribution server, normally in a subdirectory of

www.apache.org:/www/www.apache.org/dist/avalon/

for example:

{{{ scp -r cvs.apache.org:~/public_html/avalon/release-candidates/dagger .

14. Send the release announcment

Wait for 24 hours to allow all the distribution mirrors to pick up the changes, then send a release announcement. For major releases, send them to users@avalon.apache.org, dev@avalon.apache.org and announce@apache.org. For smaller releases, omit the announce@apache.org address. You may also want to send the release announcements to news sites such as theserverside.com, slashdot.org, etc etc.

Also make sure to post the announcement on the website.

Example Release Announcement

{{{ subject: Avalon-Dagger 1.2 released

In summary

Basically:

checklist:

  1. refresh tech skills
  2. discuss goals
  3. write release plan, volunteer
  4. build, and test release candidate
  5. tag cvs
  6. sign and deploy release candidate
  7. announce release candidate
  8. repeat 4-7 as required, automating as much as possible
  9. call PMC vote to give a candidate the 'final' status
  10. deploy release
  11. send announcements (after 24 hours)
  12. take a deserved break!

AvalonReleaseManagerHowto (last edited 2009-09-20 23:31:32 by localhost)