Foreman 3.15 branching process

This procedure was generated from procedures/foreman/branch.md.erb at df4721cb6a99c3eaa4a2480b83d4aacae53eed54

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Roles

Prep Week: 2025-04-29 to 2025-05-03

Installer Maintainer

Release Owner

  • Ensure headline features planned for the release have been merged or push them off to the next release.
  • Translations:
    • Update locales in foreman develop: make -C locale tx-update
    • Ask plugin authors to start extracting i18n strings and pushing the changes into develop/master git branches so Transifex can pick it up
    • Announce string freeze date on Discourse and send announcement
    • Update foreman-dev with translations status (click on Report) to encourage 100% translations before release

Stabilization Week: 2025-05-06 to 2025-05-10

Release Owner

  • Announce start of stabilization week to discourse development category.
  • Request new Hammer CLI release from maintainers if needed.
  • Prepare the manual for the new version:
    • Update installer options section of nightly manual using the get-params script
    • Copy website manual content from nightly to 3.15 and update version numbers mentioned in it.
      • cp -r manuals/nightly manuals/3.15
      • cp -r _includes/manuals/nightly _includes/manuals/3.15
      • sed -i 's/nightly/3.15/i' manuals/3.15/*.md
      • sed -i '/previous_version/ s/: .\+/: "3.15"/' manuals/nightly/index.md
      • sed -i '/- nightly/a \ \ - "3.15"' _config.yml
    • Clean up deprecation and upgrade warnings from nightly manual for in both foreman.adoc and katello.adoc.
  • Add new languages that are at a reasonable completion on Transifex to develop

Release Engineer

Branching: 2025-05-13

Release Engineer

  • Branch RPM packaging
    • Create a rpm/3.15 branch in foreman-packaging based on rpm/develop: git checkout rpm/develop && git pull && git checkout -b rpm/3.15
    • Update foreman_version in package_manifest.yaml on the rpm/3.15 branch: sed -i '/foreman_version:/ s/nightly/3.15/' package_manifest.yaml
    • Update katello_version in package_manifest.yaml on the rpm/3.15 branch: sed -i '/katello_version:/ s/nightly/KATELLO_VERSION_HERE/' package_manifest.yaml
    • Create release repositories in Copr by forking nightly repositories obal copr-project copr_projects on the rpm/3.15 branch
    • Push the rpm/3.15 branch
  • Branch Debian packaging

Release Owner

The next step should only be done after all branching, including packaging, has completed.

Preparing build systems: 2025-05-13

Release engineer

  • Merge the earlier created jenkins-jobs PR that creates the release pipelines
  • Update foreman-packaging rpm/develop to ensure nightlies build:
    • rpm/develop:
      • Update the build tag: sed -i 's/fm3_7/fm3_8/g' package_manifest.yaml
      • Set to version 3.16.0, reset release to 1: sed -i '/^Version:/ s/[0-9\.]\+$/3.16.0/ ; /^%global release/ s/[0-9]\+$/1/' packages/foreman/foreman{,-{installer,proxy,release,selinux}}/*.spec packages/foreman/rubygem-hammer_cli{,_foreman}/*.spec
      • Create a changelog using obal changelog --message '- Bump version to 3.16-develop' foreman{,-{installer,proxy,release,selinux}} rubygem-hammer_cli{,_foreman}
      • Commit: git commit -a -m 'Bump version to 3.16-develop'
    • deb/develop: scripts/changelog.rb -v 3.16.0-1 -m "Bump changelog to 3.16.0 to match VERSION" debian/*/*/changelog
  • Prepare build systems for 3.15 release:
    • foreman-packaging’s rpm/3.15
      • Update packages/foreman/foreman-release/foreman.gpg, mock/*.cfg, package_manifest.yaml and repoclosure/*.conf
    • foreman-packaging’s deb/3.15
  • Trigger the foreman-packaging-rpm-3.15 job once, so that GitHub hooks are properly set up.
  • Trigger the foreman-packaging-deb-3.15 job once, so that GitHub hooks are properly set up.

Other systems: 2025-05-13

Release Owner

  • Create the 3.15.0-rc release procedure in Development/Releases: PROJECT=foreman VERSION=3.15 ./procedure_release 2025-05-13 '@lhellebr' '@ogajduse' | wl-copy
  • Create a Foreman 3.16 Schedule and Planning post on Development/Releases using schedule: ./schedule 2025-05-14 (make sure there are no conflicts with other important dates)
  • Ensure current Foreman deprecations for the next release are removed in develop

This was based on the wiki procedure and sometimes has a bit more info.