March 25, 2018 posted by Martin Husemann

In recent years, no one in the releng team has had adequate time to devote to release engineering work. To address this shortcoming, the foundation has agreed to pay me part time to carry out the following duties:

process pullup tickets

write and update release notes

coordinate with the security team

plan for future releases and release milestones

identify and document critical bugs preventing a release

create documents/web-/wikipages describing the current status of releases/release branches and keep them up to date

identify missing pullups and push developers to submit pullup requests

While this does not automatically provide developer time (still subject to volunteer time and motivation), it is however still a major step forward towards handling the release cycle, which is (currently) taking too long, in a professional manner.

We hope to

Speed up the release process for all pending releases on all active branches, as specified by the releng team and documented on the releng wiki page(s)

Make the release process more transparent by providing up to date and easily accessible status documents

Create better releases by making sure critical bugs get identified and fixed (if possible)

To help the other issue mentioned above, we plan to offer (small) bug bounties for bugs identified as release show-stoppers.