+1 all around, a suggestion: Have a release rotation that cycles through the core team/contributor list, so everyone is in charge perhaps only once every other month (or a few weeks). Make sure the last guy to release hounds the next guy (so you, Aaron would be first at bat to hound who's on deck) to make sure they have their stuff together and know how to do it properly.
-Nick On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 8:15 PM, Aaron Patterson <[email protected] > wrote: > Hi folks, > > I want to talk about the release process. Specifically, I want to talk > about > how we can improve our release process. > > There are a couple things I want to see in our release process: > > 1) Regular, periodic releases. > > I had been shooting for every four weeks for the 3.0.x series. I don't > think > this means we have to be held to a particular deadline. I think that if > people > know that approximately every N weeks, we'll have a release, it will help > reduce upgrade friction. > > Mainly what this means to me is setting expectations with the community, > and > sticking to what we say. > > 2) Distributed responsibility > > I would like to improve our Bus Factor. Today, I am the only one doing > releases. That means we have a Bus Factor of one. If I get hit, who will > take > responsibility? > > In order to fix this, I think we need other core team members to do > releases. > In fact, I think it should be a requirement *as a core team member* to do > releases. > > We require that core team members are able to work on all aspects of Rails > (AR, > AS, AP, etc). If we make this requirement for the code base, we need to > make > this requirement of our process. > > We all need to go through the pain of the rubber actually hitting the road. > We all need to make the tough decision to release, or to face our users and > tell them why it is late. > > I propose that we each take turns releasing Rails, and we publish who will > be > doing which release. I think it will improve our Bus Factor, frequency and > stability of our releases, and improve our team overall. > > If we can agree on these items, I will put together documentation about how > to > release Rails, along with a roster of who will be releasing what. I will > even > personally work with each core team member until we're all comfortable with > the > process. > > The status quo cannot remain. I can't be around all the time to do > releases, > as frankly, it's burning me out. > > -- > Aaron Patterson > http://tenderlovemaking.com/ > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en.
