[petsc-dev] plans for PETSc release

[Jed Brown]

Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

>    No PETSc developer/user has ever done or is likely ever to do all
>    the cool testing you think will happen during a feature freeze;
>    your fantasies are quite bizarre :-). 

Well, I've done this at least with PFLOTRAN and libMesh/MOOSE for
various previous releases.  I'm pretty sure Lisandro has done similar
with some of his packages and Matt with PyLith.  I've tested on NERSC
and ALCF early access machines.  I thought others had been doing similar
as time and access allowed.

>    Plus if there are testing environments not in the nightly builds
>    that one "could" try during the freeze week the priority should be
>    getting those environments into the nightly builds, not just
>    testing on them one week a year.

The machines I'm thinking of are managed by other people and typically
not convenient to have running automated tests (sometimes due to
security like cryptocard logins).  When we test a version there, we're
testing both that version of PETSc and the environment on the machine,
which are often being "upgraded" periodically.

>    This is also the first time that I was aware that we ever did a
>    week long feature freeze in the past! We've always done the move it
>    quickly into a release approach.

We've usually had precise deadlines announced in advance, with the
release being tagged some days later.  It was a literal code freeze back
in v3.3, but you're right that it has been more variable and ad-hoc than
I remembered.


v3.6:

  2015-05-28: bsmith on petsc-dev "Satish and I are planning a PETSc
  release by Friday June 5"

  2015-06-09 Release tagged

v3.5:

  2014-06-12: bsmith on petsc-dev "Please get all changes into master
  before 9pm central time USA on Sunday June 15th that you would like in
  the release. At that time Satish will make a release branch and the
  only changes allowed in that release branch will be bug fixes that do
  not change the API."

  2014-06-30: Release tagged

v3.4 seems to have been relatively stealth, though there was plenty of
off-list discussion.  This was shortly after we switched to Git.

v3.3:

  2012-05-17: bsmith on petsc-dev "Recall that we are in a phase of a
  code freeze that means do not push random new code to petsc-dev, push
  only bug fixes and clean up to petsc-dev.  By all means keep on with
  code development, just don't push the new stuff to petsc-dev.

  We hope to make the release repository (and then tarball) next
  Wednesday May 23. So please do be checking the nightly builds and
  making fixes to petsc-dev."

  2012-06-05: Release tagged
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