[petsc-dev] petsc release plan for Sep/2021

[Satish Balay]

All,

Its time for another PETSc release - due end of Sept.

For this release [3.16], lets work with the following dates:

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

Merges after freeze should contain only fixes that would normally be acceptable to "release" work-flow.

I've created a new milestone 'v3.16-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