[Mesa-dev] [RFC] Mesa release improvements - Feature and Stable releases

[Juan A. Suarez Romero]

On Mon, 2018-03-12 at 17:17 +0200, Andres Gomez wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Juan and I have been talking lately that it is clear that reaching the
> final version of a feature releases is often getting hard.
> 
> Therefore, we would like to propose that no stable release will be
> carried on by the same release team member while on duty doing a
> feature release. This will help to avoid collateral problems like
> delays on bugfixing releases, for example.
> 
> In other words, we propose that Emil will be taking care of focusing on
> the feature releases while Juan and I will be the ones doing the bugfix
> releases, by now.
> 

I agree. This is something that we try to do, but it is good that we explicitly
state it. 

This would unload Emil for working in two releases at the same time, giving him
more time to work on other tasks, if required.

> --
> 
> Additionally, I'd welcome greater visibility/transparency on the
> process leading to the selection of a branch point for a feature
> release [0].
> 
> Right now this is loosely explained process by which the release team
> member doing the branch announces their intention and gets feedback
> from developers who would like to still complete some feature before
> the creation of the branch.
> 
> My proposal would be, similarly to what Intel does to track [1] the
> stabilization for a release, 1 week (?) prior to the branching time to
> create a metabug in bugzilla (or GitLab in the future ?), to announce
> this metabug in mesa-dev and to let any developer who wants to see
> their feature into the coming release to open a blocking bug for this
> metabug explaining such feature and its progress. This way we can track
> the progress and the process will be more transparent. We can still be
> flexible to include the blocking features but the coordination will
> happen over these bugs.
> 

So, when the branch point is created? After the metabug is closed? or 1 week
after the metabug is created?


Not sure if this provide any difference on what we are doing now: create the
branchpoint, open a metabug with the desire features, and cherry-pick all the
patches that solves the metabug.


> Likewise, once the branch point is created, I would create another
> metabug to track the progress of eventual regressions until the final
> release version.
> 


> 
> [0] https://www.mesa3d.org/releasing.html#branch
> [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104757