Howto release (suggestions)

[Benedikt Meurer]

Hello,

First: We have already two people for the release team: Luis Miguel Garcia and
Net Llama, would be nice, if more people would join. Atleast it would be
nice if people could join as translators for the release notes and
do announcements for their Linux/Unix news sites in their country (e.g.
I would do www.heise.de, www.linux-community.de and pro-linux.de if
nobody else wants to).

I would also be nice to have a separate mailinglist for the release team,
so they can coordinate their work (in case we get more than 2 people for
the release team :-).

Here are my suggestions how we could do releases:

Day -x:
-------
	- Decide when to do the release

Day 1:
------
	- Choose what modules should be part of the release.
	- Notify the module maintainers to have a last look at the
	  modules
	- Notify the release team to plan the announcements and write
	  the release notes (e.g. they should create a list whats new
	  in this release, see the ChangeLog and the mailing list
	  archives for this; e.g. BETA2 will have improved Xinerama
	  support, SVG themes, an improved mixer, etc.)

Day 2:
------
	- Tag CVS (e.g. with xfce4-beta1 or xfce4-final).
	- Notify testers and the release team to test the tagged CVS version
	  (IMPORTANT: make dist and make rpm should be checked for each module)

Day 3:
------
	- The release notes should now be ready. Translate them to other
	  languages. (release team)
	- Write the announcements for the various news sites, and find
	  people that write announcements for non-english news sites
	  (as already said, I could do the german ones), but do not
	  send the announcements yet (release team)
	- create tarballs (I think Olivier will do this) and put them
	  on a temporary web/ftp space.
	- test the tarballs (everybody's welcome)
	- the release team should now notify package maintainers, e.g.
	  *BSD, debian, gentoo maintainers, so they can prepare
	  their packages to be ready on release date.

Day 4:
------
	- Last chance to fix bugs

Day 5:
------
	- put the final tarballs to sf files section
	- notify mirror maintainers to sync the files
	- create RPMs (the release team should coordinate who creates
	  what RPMs, so we don't end up with 4 people doing
	  RPMs for RedHat :-)

Day 6:
------
	- Upload RPMs
	- put the release notes and the translated release notes online
	  (the release team should also prepare a text for the NEWS
	  section of the XFce homepage)
	- Send announcements and do further advertising (release team)
	- Enjoy! :-)

Opinions?

Benedikt

-- 
NetBSD Operating system:                       http://www.NetBSD.org/
pkgsrc "Work in progress":                  http://pkgsrc-wip.sf.net/
XFce desktop environment:                        http://www.xfce.org/
German Unix-AG Association:                   http://www.unix-ag.org/