[Hawkular-dev] Release Process - Hawkular Metrics + Components

[Stefan Negrea]

Hello Everybody, 

Had some great conversations and feedback this week about the release process for Hawkular Metrics. A few ideas emerged and this email is a summary of the process Hawkular Metrics will implement starting next release (expected as soon as next week).

Release Process:
1) Use semver as the versioning standard (http://semver.org/)
2) A scheduled release:
  a) is a planned release, with a set of significant changes
  b) is the next increment on MAJOR.MINOR version (eg: from 0.4.0 to 0.5.0)
  c) gets a dedicated branch from master
  d) gets tagged on the branch
  e) gets full release notes, JIRA, email communication, blog
  f) bits are published to JBoss Nexus and Github
3) A patch release
  a) needed to address urgent bugs or regression between scheduled releases
  b) is an increment in the PATCH version (eg. 0.4.2)
  c) no dedicated branch, patches are applied to the branch of a 'scheduled release'
  d) gets tagged on the working branch
  e) no release notes, blog posts, or similar communication; the only official communication will be a list of JIRAs fixed
  f) bits published to JBoss Nexus and Github
  g) all the code fixes will be applied retroactively to master


Hawkular Metrics will keep 'scheduled releases' at roughly one a month. The 'patch releases' will be created on a need basis and only if there are JIRAs reported against the 'scheduled release' or 'patch release' that need to be addressed before the next 'scheduled release'. One goal with the patch releases is to avoid publish a huge number of them in a short amount of time (eg. 2 per day). This does not impact at all the release for SNAPSHOTS; they will continue to get published from the code in the master branch.


It would be great if all the projects converge on a similar process. I recognize that due to different maturity levels that might not be practical now for everybody, but it would be huge win for the entire Hawkular to make even small steps in the same direction.



Thank you,
Stefan Negrea

Software Engineer