On 1 Nov 2011, at 10:19, Paul Sharples wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I thought I'd put together some thoughts on our current release management, 
> after a few conversations I have had off list.  As I am sure you are all 
> aware, I originally created a branch for a release, I then made the artifacts 
> from this branch and started the vote thread. (I subsequently made further 
> 'release candidates' from this branch if the original vote failed).  However, 
> this is not the ideal method of putting builds out (for a number of reasons) 
> For example -  having to port fixes back to the branch from the trunk. (This 
> happened twice with version 0.9.1 and 0.9.0)
> 
> From now on and starting from the 0.9.2 build I suggest to do it differently. 
>  I plan to tag the trunk when we want to make a release and then create the 
> build artifacts from that.  This means that...
> 
> (1) Getting ready for a build I would update all the property files in the 
> trunk, removing any -SNAPSHOT references. For example I would update the 
> current trunk property files from '0.9.2-incubating-SNAPSHOT' to read 
> '0.9.2-incubating'
> (2) The trunk would be tagged and after that, the trunk version moves on by 
> one.  For example for next build I would create a '0.9.2-incubating' tag.  
> The trunk property files would subsequently be set to 
> '0.9.3-incubating-SNAPSHOT'.
> (3) If a vote fails, we move onto the next version no matter what. For 
> example the next one being' 0.9.2-incubating', if that vote fails then we 
> move onto '0.9.3-incubating' as the next release.  The trunk will now 
> probably be set to' 0.9.3-incubating-SNAPSHOT' anyway. (this means that 
> sometimes we may skip a version because the vote failed)
> (4) Tagged versions of code are not modified and will only be used to build 
> artifacts from.
> (5) We will no longer have Release Candidate versions. i.e. 0.9.1-RC1,  
> 0.9.1-RC2.
> (6) We need to re-jig our JIRA issue management.  We originally had lots & 
> lots of issues per version.  As we are a small project (in terms of 
> commiters) we need to spread out issues so that we can get the tasks done and 
> be able to make releases more often.
> (7) I believe RAVE, for example releases about once a month - do we also want 
> to release that often, or is it better to do it every 6 weeks or every two 
> months for us?
> (8) Releasing more builds, more often means we are (possibly) going to get to 
> version 1.0 a lot quicker.
> 
> thoughts?
> 
> Paul

I like all of these ideas - for 6/7 I think we can just keeping upping the 
tempo for each release to a rate that works for us. Definitely we should 
release more frequently, with fewer issues attached to each release.

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