[petsc-dev] petsc release plan for march/2020

[Jed Brown]

Thanks for taking the lead on this, Satish.

Satish Balay via petsc-dev <petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

> All,
>
> We are to make a petsc release by the end of March.
>
> For this release [3.13], will work with the following dates:
>
> - feature freeze: March 27 say 5PM EST
> - release: March 29
>
> Merges after freeze should contain only fixes that would normally be acceptable to maint workflow.
>
> I've changed the current milestone 'v3.13' to 'master' and created a new one 'v3.13-release'

Why this way?  Is the idea to bulk-offload everything we had intended to
get in this release?  I feel like we should ping those merge
requests/issues asking people to either commit to completing them or
defer to post-release.

> If you are working on a MR with the goal of merging before release - its best to use 'v3.13-release' tag with the MR.
>
> And it would be good to avoid merging large changes at the last minute. And not have merge requests stuck in need of reviews, testing and other necessary tasks.
>
> And I would think the testing/CI resources would get stressed in this timeframe - so it would be good to use them judiciously if possible.
>
> - if there are failures in stage-2 or 3 - and its no longer necessary to complete all the jobs - one can 'cancel' the pipeline.
> - if a fix needs to be tested - one can first test with only the failed jobs (if this is known) - before doing a full test pipeline. i.e:
>    - start pipeline
>    - immediately cancel the pipeline
>    - now toggle only the jobs that need to be run
>    - [on success of the selected jobs] if one wants to run the full pipeleine - click 'retry' - and the remaining canceled jobs should now get scheduled.
>
> thanks,
> Satish