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

[Satish Balay]

All,

We are to make a petsc release by the end of September.

For this release [3.14], will work with the following dates:

- feature freeze: Sept 27 say 5PM EST
- release: Sept 29

Merges after freeze should contain only fixes that would normally be acceptable to maint workflow.

I've created a new milestone 'v3.14-release'. So if you are working on a MR with the goal of merging before release - its best to use this 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:
   - use the automatically started and paused 'merge-request' pipeline (or start new 'web' pipeline, and cancel it immediately)
   - 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