[darcs-users] Bits from the RM (was: Petr Ročkai is the new darcs Release Manager)

[Petr Rockai]

Hi,

Eric Kow <eric.kow at gmail.com> writes:
> Fortunately, Petr Ročkai will be taking over in this
> role.  Many thanks and good luck to both of you!
thanks Eric!

> Note that for this release, we will be experimenting with a notion of
> release branches.  More news on that later!
Darcs is dutifully copying patches for the branch right now. When that's done,
the release branch will be available at:

http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/branch-2.2

I will be pulling in patches from http://darcs.net as I see fit for the
release. Since the release date is approaching quickly, here is the preliminary
schedule:

- 15th of December, release branch is shallow-frozen; only patches fixing
  important issues or implementing release goals will be let in
- 18th of December, pre1 is tagged and released
- 30th of December, release branch is deep-frozen; only release-critical fixes
  will go in
- 3rd of January, pre2 is tagged and released
- 10th of January, rc1 is tagged and released
- 15th of January, rc1 is re-tagged as 2.2 final, bar any critical issues

- if rc1 is however found to be buggy, we fix it and release rc2 on 15th and
  slip the release by 7 days, re-tagging it final on 22nd. We will repeat this
  procedure until no release-critical issues are found or, alternatively, we
  get tired and release buggy darcs 2.2...

I agree that some of those dates are suboptimal, and the holidays are
interfering, but unfortunately, there's only little leeway. I'll try to stick
with the schedule and only slip responsibly.

The release goals for this release are, as stated by Eric:

1) Work on improving the situation with repair/check performance regression
that was introduced (by me) somewhere around 2.0.2, without compromising the
improved robustness...

2) Provide a skeletal libdarcs, that gives absolutely no API guarantees.

3) Cabal build working out of the box.

4) Improved windows support.

And a not-so-much-a-release-goal, but a related issue, we want to produce some
performance report from 2.2 versus 2.1 versus 2.0.2. My darcs-benchmark is
currently running, and I will provide first draft numbers early.

I understand Thorkil will be sweeping the bugtracker in the meantime, so
hopefully we will get some better overview on the bug status. I would love to
see a URL that will point me to a list of "what concerns us for the next
release" issues, if that's technically feasible with roundup.

Since 2.2 is being gradually frozen, I'd like to start collecting changelog
entries. I see:

23:00:01 | xroc at ann:~/dev/public/darcs/branch-2.2 -> darcs changes --from-tag 2.1 --count
350

so there's a fair amount of work that went into 2.2, and it would be great to
have it documented in a user-digestible way. Unfortunately, I know zilch about
how our changelog is made (or whether that work is already done, or almost
done).

Moreover, we should start looking at what can and should be done for 2.3. A
quick glance at http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/Roadmap gives me a rough idea
that there are definitely some things under 2.2 than need to be bumped to 2.3,
as well as some items on their own. I have to admit that using the wiki for
this kind of planning is sort of sub-optimal, and I'd love to see someone bend
our bug-tracker to handle that in a better way. I am thinking of something like
trac milestones, where we can file tickets and show them by target milestone.
I suppose how we handle this is open for discussion... For now, I'll stick with
the wiki, until there's a better solution.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading and have a good time hacking darcs!

Yours,
   Petr.

PS: The release branch has finished getting in the meantime, so it now lives on
http://repos.mornfall.net/darcs/branch-2.2 -- it's currently identical to
http://darcs.net, or at least should be. It may or may not start to diverge as
we go into freeze mode, depending on darcs.net traffic.

-- 
Peter Rockai | me()mornfall!net | prockai()redhat!com
 http://blog.mornfall.net | http://web.mornfall.net

"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
 indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
     -- Blair P. Houghton on the subject of C program indentation