github release procedure

[Rob T]

On Friday, 4 January 2013 at 17:11:54 UTC, Johannes Pfau wrote:
> The more I think about it, staging really seems to be useful to 
> avoid
> some corner cases.

I haven't had time to study the newly proposed process in enough 
detail to properly comment, but it always seemed to me that you 
cannot get away without a staging branch. You can try very hard 
to do without, but it means something else will suffer for the 
lack of it, so it seems you are coming to the same conclusion 
which is good (unless I'm wrong).

If we look at how the current 2.061.0 release went down, there 
was clearly no staging at all, it went straight out just as it 
did in the past, and we're already seeing complaints about broken 
code and bug fixes that should have gone into the release that 
were left out. We're also finding bugs discovered right after the 
release was made, this is not good and should not happen.

The whole point of having a process has been defeated in terms of 
the goal of creating highly stable releases. What has been 
released is in effect a beta release or the same thing as a 
staging release, it is *not* a stable release! If it was a stable 
release, we would not see so many immediate problems.

I realize this was our fist pass through with an incomplete 
process, and almost no buy in from the devs who were to use it, 
so with that said we have clearly made some significant 
improvements, and I do not want to take away from that, however I 
hope we can all refocus on the goal of releasing only high 
quality software, not half baked betas.

Thanks!

--rt