It has been 2 months since 1.18 was branched (April 16th). Since we want to return to a 3 month release cadence, next core branching will be just under one month from now, on July 16th. As @Marek_Hulanmentioned, as part of my new role I will be managing the 1.19 release in cooperation with @ekohl who will be the release engineer in charge of this release.
In the last several releases, there was a rush to get features into the release at the last moment, leading to unstable nightlies, delayed branching, and difficulty in getting the stable branch built, leading to longer release cycles (~5 months in average for the last 3 releases).
To avoid this situation for 1.19, I request that all people working on features they wish to include in 1.19 make sure that their code is ready to merge at least a week before branching. Please also avoid bumping dependencies if possible in the days prior to branching to make sure we have stable nightlies on the branching day. I would ask @packaging and @infra teams also coordinate with me in the week leading up to branching regarding any changes that may lead to instabilities in nightlies or pipelines.
In case there are significant changes which you believe should be merged during this period (or even post branching), please discuss them with me so that we can reach a joint agreement regarding them without jeopardizing the release stability or timelines.
To help reviewers to prioritize PRs/issue for inclusion 1.19, please mark PRs with the 1.19 milestone and redmine issues with the 1.19 release (if you do not have the necessary permissions to do so yourself, please reach out to me or any of the other @core contributors).
If there are any question or concerns regarding this, please reach out to me here or on IRC.
We should really have a job in jenkins that builds RPMs/Debs in any PR that changes Gemfile/package.json, to ensure this kind of breakage cannot happen.
We are now two weeks from branching day.
A lot of effort has been put into bringing nightlies to a stable state over the past few weeks, and we are almost there! (Katello nightlies not publishing seems to indicate tomorrow will hopefully see a resolution of the remaining issue with katello) Thank you to everyone who has been involved in this.
As I stated in the previous message, I would ask all @core, @infra and @packaging maintainers to refrain from merging significant changes in the week prior to branching without coordination with me. If there is any significant change that you wish merged into this release, please do your best to get it merged into develop this week, so we have time to handle any issues that may arise prior to branching.
Thank you all for the cooperation and understanding!
Talking about next release, how does it look like with Rails 5.2 [1]? Is this something that we would target for 1.19, or this is already out of scope?
Looking at the related issues looks like quite a few of them are still New, and it would also require updating the SCL, so I have a hard time seeing it ready within the next week.
But perhaps @mmoll who has been working on it has a better view of the status?
I think it’s not doable, I wouldn’t want to have a .0 Rails release for this and using the current 5-2-stable Rails already introduces two more test failures that would need attention.
Branching is in 1 week.
Please refrain from merging any major changes in @core, @packaging or @infra that may lead to broken nightlies without coordination with me until branching is done. Thanks for the cooperation!
