Programming, Software and Code

Parrot Release Managers

19 Aug 2009
legacy  —  Parrot  —  Release
A while back Coke said I could take over the job of herding release managers, and I gleefully took him up on the offer. A few days ago I sent out an email asking for people to fill in for the remaining releases this year. Specifically we're looking for some fresh blood, new people to give the release a shot. Every new person we get doing releases helps to increase our bus number ever higher, and a good bus number is good for us (and bad for buses).

Shortly after the announcement I got a few emails from interested people, including a few from people who have never done a release before. Signed up fo the rest of the year are: particle (1.6), dukeleto (1.7), bernhard (1.8) and gerd (1.9). After that the schedule is wide open.

I've managed a few releases at this point, and I can say with some confidence that it's really not a hard process at all. Actually, there are several steps that I think would be ripe for automation and could become even easier, if an intrepid releaser were interested in doing so. I won't opine about that too much here, just mentioning it off-hand.

Here are the basic steps for making a release.
  1. Send out some messages on IRC and on the mailing list for people to update NEWS and PLATFORMS.
  2. Update NEWS and PLATFORMS yourself, because everybody ignored your messages to the mailing list.
  3. Update the version number in a variety of files, even though we have computer programs and programming languages capable of incrementing digits.
  4. Come up with a name that's too clever by half. Don't tell anybody, that would ruin the surprise (Since our release schedule is so regular and predictable, we need to have some surprises!)
  5. Waste 20 minutes of your life Run fulltest. I like to spend this time watching TV, chatting on IRC, eating junk food, or looking up funny pictures of cats on the interwebs.
  6. Make the release. This is the hard part: Type "make release VERSION=a.b.c".
  7. Unpack the tarball into a new directory. Build it and waste 20 more minutes of your life run make fulltest again.
  8. Upload the tarball to the FTP server
  9. Send out a bunch of announcement emails telling people that we've made a release even though we could program Google Calendar to do this on the third tuesday of the month, every month, for the next thousand years. Tell everybody it's a big deal regardless of how dependable and boring our release cycle is.
  10. Rake in the karma on IRC.
I am joking about several of these things, obviously. I make light precisely because it's not a big deal by design. We want Parrot releases to be quick, easy, and regular. Unextraordinary (ordinary?). It's easy to do, and we want lots of people to do it. It's easy, it's no big deal, there is no reason why you shouldn't be involved in it.

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