Release Coordinating
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This page gives some notes on how to go about coordinating a DSpace release. |
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DSpace is a community driven open source project. This means that the requirements for new features are driven by the community, and the actual code developments are contributed by the community. Therefore much of the role of the release coordinator team is based around working closely with the community to ensure that requirements are documented, and code is contributed.
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Generally speaking, the release team helps coordinate the next release of DSpace. This may include (not an exhaustive list):
- Helping Help keep code development around a release organized (DSpace JIRA is a great resource for keeping organized)
- e.g. Ensure each new feature or bug fix has a developer assigned to it
- e.g. If a developer needs help/feedback, help locate that help/feedback from the Committers or the community
- Helping Help communicate information about the Release to DSpace Community
- Reporting Report on release status updates during DSpace Developer Meetings
- Asking Ask for additional help/support when a release requires it
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- Work with the committer group to find volunteers to take patches, claim PRs, code review / test them, and commit them to SVN.merge into the codebase
- Determine a feature freeze date. In a normal release cycle, there will hopefully be a constant influx of patches waiting to be rolled into the relevant release. The feature freeze date, therefore, need not be a long way in advance. It's useful if the date is a Friday, as this allows trailing time-zones to catch up before work in earnest can start on code integration on the Monday.
- Announce to dspace-devel, dspace-tech and dspace-general lists the date of the feature freeze for the coming release, requesting patches and bug fixes.
- The job of the release team is not to test all the patches and fix all the bugs, but to help others in doing so. Advise the list of any important events in development and liaise with patch authors to ensure smooth development.
- Once the free freeze date has occurred, hold a Testathon. Encourage the community to take part in the testathon to make the release less buggy. Ask for volunteers to run test instances of the new version to allow people who do not have access to a server to be able to test it.
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- The release team is responsible for building the release package and uploading it to SourceForge. See Release Procedure for information on how to do this. The release team should also email dspace-devel, dspace-tech and dspace-general to announce the release.
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