Nice email, Remi! The most important point that everyone has to be aware of:
Master is release branch for 4.7 ================================ Master has now become the 4.7.0 release branch. Please see PR [2] to make that happen. Soon, we will start accepting all types of Pull Requests again. But please keep in mind that we still allow contributions to master only via a Pull Request. This Pull Request should be properly reviewed (code + integration tests), see [3]. Please, avoid merging untested/broken stuff to Master. Let us all make sure Master stays stable! Cheers, Wilder On 15 Nov 2015, at 21:59, Remi Bergsma <rberg...@schubergphilis.com<mailto:rberg...@schubergphilis.com>> wrote: Hi all, Congratulations on the release of Apache CloudStack 4.6.0. A new release is always great, but this time it is even better that we released it off a stable master! Thanks for everyone's understanding when we had to freeze master for quite some weeks. It helped, as we were able to make master a stable branch. The last 5 weeks before release, we merged about 100 Pull Requests. Finally some velocity! On all of those merged Pull Requests we executed ~70 Marvin integration tests, against real hardware. For any blocker we added a new test, to prevent it from happening again. While testing each Pull Request takes quite some effort, it does achieve and maintain high quality. You could see it when we started the RCs, it was a smooth process. This stability will make us much more flexible from now on. We do need to improve the testing, make it more generic and hook it to Jenkins, and we will. Some points of attention: 4.6 branch ========== Now that 4.6.0 has been relased, it has been branched to the '4.6' branch. >From this branch, we will release upcoming 4.6.x releases. The current version there is set to '4.6.1-SNAPSHOT'. Upgrade paths have been developed and tested, see [1]. Master is release branch for 4.7 ================================ Master has now become the 4.7.0 release branch. Please see PR [2] to make that happen. Soon, we will start accepting all types of Pull Requests again. But please keep in mind that we still allow contributions to master only via a Pull Request. This Pull Request should be properly reviewed (code + integration tests), see [3]. Existing Pull Requests ====================== PRs with bug fixes should be made against 4.6, instead of master. Anything we will merge to master, will not be in a 4.6.x release. Anything merged to 4.6, will be forward merged to master and thus also be included in 4.7.0. New features will go into master (while it is unfrozen). Please look at your open Pull Requests and make them against the correct branch. Ping me if you need help. Release Principles ================== Last summer, when Rajani and myself proposed to be the RMs, we published a wiki page [3] on how we thought we should release. That same page, with some minor edits to make things more clear, is still very relevant today. Please have a look as it explains how we'll move forward from this point on. A new thing that comes into play is the "forward merging" of bug fixes from 4.6 to master branch. Want to help? ============= I'd like to be RM for 4.7 as well, especially to help with the parts that are new and to help others getting up to speed with the process detailed in [3]. I didn't talk to Rajani about it yet. Anyone else wants to step up? I think it's fine having multiple RMs to share the load. Dates ===== Mon Nov 16: Master is 4.7.0-SNAPSHOT and is open for new features (will be announced separately) Mon Nov 30: 4.6.1 RC1 Mon Dec 7: 4.7.0 freeze Mon Dec 14: 4.7.0 RC1 I know Rohit also wants to do 4.5.3 around this time, so we'll coordinate. Releasing 4.7.0 before Christmas.. that would be awesome, wouldn't it? We can do it! There are several Pull Requests with new features waiting to land on a stable master that soon will become 4.7.0 :-) Regards, Remi [1] https://github.com/apache/cloudstack/pull/1067 [2] https://github.com/apache/cloudstack/pull/1068 [3] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CLOUDSTACK/Release+principles+for+Apache+CloudStack+4.6+and+up
