Re: Cutting a release?

[Ivan Vučica]

On Tue, Jan 1, 2019 at 11:44 PM Yavor Doganov <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> В Tue, 01 Jan 2019 23:28:35 +0000, Ivan Vučica написа:
> > On Tue, Jan 1, 2019 at 9:43 PM Yavor Doganov <address@hidden> wrote:
> >> I believe it's too late for that.
> >>
> > I could cut a release this weekend, and then we do another one by the
> > end of the month.
>
> It is probably doable, but there should be a combintation of factors in
> our favor to make it work.  We need to get the new release in experimental
> (ideally built on all release architectures) before 11th so that I file a
> transition bug before the deadline [1].


I realized I'm not sure what transition means. Out of curiosity, is it
the transition from e.g.  libgnustep-gui0.26 to libgnustep-gui0.27?
That is, is the problem creation of a new binary package?

>
> So, if you release on Sat/Sun
> and we prepare the package almost immediately, we'll have to wait for a
> sponsor to do the upload and then for ftpmasters to process it as it has
> to pass through the NEW queue.  This is the biggest hurdle; sometimes it
> takes a few days but it may take months.


I think I have a few DDs I might be able to bother for sponsorship if
we agree on a release. I suppose ftpmasters will be a hard block at
that point.

In the meantime, if maintainers could help me out by updating the
non-autogenerated news entries and such, that'd help a lot. Crawling
through the ChangeLogs and VCS logs takes a lot of the time when
cutting a release I could better spend wrestling with git tagging, GPG
signing and uploading to multiple locations.

>
> We are doing a Pantomime
> transition right now despite the fact that 1.3.0 was released long time
> ago; it spent months in the NEW queue and then I had to wait a further
> month to verify that it builds on mipsen (slowest buildds always lagging).
>
> [1] Assuming that the Debian Release Team will process these bugs on the
> basis that they're filed before the deadline; they may well postpone
> these transitions after the buster release.

*sigh* I love bureaucracy.

It's really hard for a non-DD to be aware of these deadlines. It's
even more fun to think about all the other distributions and OSes that
I'm not even trying to track.