Krita 3.0.1 Release Process

Tue Aug 16 07:58:48 UTC 2016

I still fail to see why we had all this panic. It was a storm in a teacup sort
of thing. What exactly went wrong? Only one thing, the feature-freeze mail wasn't
cc'ed to the docs mailing list. Well, when we had our release checklist skype
call that wasn't even mentioned. Now we know, and it can be fixed.

The translation branch thing had been discussed and just hadn't happened, that 
was all. It hadn't been forgotten by us.

I do not want to make changes even before we've had one cycle to learn from. We
already have a system that sends the mails; we don't need another one. We already
have a checklist, and it's a nice and short one:

===============

Checklist

0 fix release scripts...
1 Announce the merge window
We open the merge window
We merge
2 We close the merge window, set the version from alpha to beta

(That's not done, because due to hardware problems, I couldn't properly do the alpha
builds when the window closed.)

We open the translation/stabilization window
Prepare updates
5 We set the version from beta to final tag in git, add version number to bugzilla, and make tarballs
6 We release: announce, update downloads
7 we bump the version number in cmake, go back to alpha

================

There is nothing going on in my head apart from these things.

The whole point of releasing every six weeks is to take the stress out of it 
because a) releases aren't such a big thing and b) if something goes wrong,
the next release is imminent anyway. Just like we had in the 2.9 days when we
had a release every month, and that went surprisingly smoothly.

What I need help with is not small things like setting version numbers. I need
people who can 

a) make the source release the right way (no volunteers, and Cyrille appears
not to be around, so that's my task for today...)
b) prepare the binaries -- also the right way (i.e., not with macports or 
so on OSX and not with MSVC on Windows, improvements to the way I do this,
for instance by signing the binaries are welcome, of course). (And I need
to fix the Windows binaries today...)

I also think that if there are problems with the translators they shouldn't be
bothering you, but write the mailing list directly. Or contact me, but even
better, they should assign a coordinator who can inteface between us and the
translation community.

Boudewijn

On Mon, 15 Aug 2016, Dmitry Kazakov wrote:

> Hi, Boud!
> 
> I know you are overloaded with stuff. And the only thing I want to do is to
> help to unload some release routines from you. The list with notifications
> will greatly help us with it. Noone can help you while all the tasks are in
> your head. We cannot read your or my or anyone's thoughts :)
> 
> It will also help us to avoid the misunderstanding, which caused us to
> spend a nice Sunday on not very nice things. When discussing the topic I
> understood that the mail to the translators will be sent, you understood
> that a mail to our mailing list is enough. That is a normal situation when
> people understand the same words differently. And to avoid that, these
> things should be written down a tracked somewhere.
> 
> And just to clarify my proposal. I don't want you to maintain this list
> entirely yourself. Remember, that the three main parts of any delegation
> are: define the tasks, assign the task and control the progress. We already
> have a rough list of tasks, so you don't need to spend your time on that.
> You should only take the tasks noone except you can do and assign the rest
> to others. And since the board is public everyone will be able to control
> the progress of the tasks execution.
> 
> That will unload  great deal of work from you. For example, I can take the
> duty of raising version numbers (it is scriptable and I wanted to play with
> python in my leisure time anyway) and sending the mails to the mailing
> lists (it takes 10 minutes every six weeks). Wolthera can do the release
> announcement (I guess she already does it). I can subscribe to her task and
> start translating it into Russian as soon as it is completed (or delegate
> it to someone if it is finished at least in three days before the release).
> And the board itself will take the duty of answering trivial people's
> questions like "When you are going to release?" "Has there been an Alpha
> release already?" :)
> 
> Why don't you want even to try to organize things? We now release every 6
> weeks, we will get crazy if we don't get organized :(
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 11:17 PM, Alexander Potashev <aspotashev at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > 2016-08-14 21:36 GMT+03:00 Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org>:
> > > Check the archive for this mailing list, that was discussed, and to
> > quote from
> > > Luigi's mail:
> > >
> > > "Translations from the master branch are still tracked into our
> > > trunk/l10n-kf5 branches. You just need to get the translations from them.
> > > I guess that there won't be stable branches anymore and you will release
> > > from master and get translations from the corresponding trunk5 branch,
> > > is it correct?
> >
> > Oops, I forgot about that email thread. Sorry Boud.
> >
> > I replied into that thread to push for deletion of "stable" translations.
> >
> > --
> > Alexander Potashev
> >
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.krita.org, http://www.valdyas.org