[Evergreen-dev] Evergreen point release discussion

[Jason Stephenson]

Below is a summary of the point release discussion from the IRC
Developers' Meeting on Tuesday, 12 December 2023.  I have endeavored
to do the summary without much editorializing, other than the choice
of what to include.

The meeting minutes are here: 
<http://evergreen-ils.org/meetings/evergreen/2023/evergreen.2023-12-12-15.00.html>.

The HTML log is here: 
<http://evergreen-ils.org/meetings/evergreen/2023/evergreen.2023-12-12-15.00.log.html>.

The log contains discussion that did not make it into the minutes.
The following summary is based on the log.

The following issues were identified:

   * lack of availability for some community members
   * lack of coordination of releases
   * difficulty of certain parts of the process

There is a perceived lack of people who can commit to help with
monthly bug fix releases.  At least one person expressed that they
cannot make it on the third Wednesday of every month.  To help with
this, the suggestion was made to reduce the frequency to bimonthly or
quarterly.

A consensus to stick with the current schedule emerged.  The following
benefits of more frequent releases were cited:

  * more opportunity for knowledge sharing
  * less drift in the upgrade script
  * less chance for the process to be forgotten
  * more incentive to improve the process

The possibility of having one person, or a team, be responsible for
maintaining each active series was discussed as a possible way to
ensure more participation in the monthly release process.  The most
serious suggestion along these lines is to have the release team, or
members of the release team, take over maintenance duties for a given
Evergreen branch.

One of the bigger issues with getting point releases done is that the
release dates often come and go with no fanfare.  There was agreement
that the community needs someone to step into the role of reminding us
when releases dates are coming up and to organize a team to get
releases done.

The #evergreen-release IRC channel and a spreadsheet

<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gZayHfF7qK0zwLMEAXt-PbKBMiAM_F6EZguqzIYceBY/edit#gid=0>

had been used to organize releases in the past.  The community
recently decided to discontinue the use of the #evergreen-release
channel.  Alternatives to IRC were discussed briefly.  The consensus
is to have release discussions in the main #evergreen channel on the
Libera IRC network for now.

Release notes and translations emerged as two procedural sticking
points in getting releases made.  Both of these touch on issues of
process and availability.

In the case of release notes, someone has to write them before we can
release.  This can be a tedious task involving looking through git
commits.  A requirement to include release notes with every code
branch was raised as a possible solution to this issue.  Such a
requirement would simplify the task of putting together release notes
to a mostly copy and paste operation.

The current translation process adds extra steps to the build and
requires requires special permissions on POEditor in order to complete
that part of the process.  This is a real hurdle as Angular
translations have to be skipped if someone is not around who can do
the steps.

In the end, it was decided that releases for 3.10.4 and 3.11.2 would
be made/attempted on Wednesday, December 13 to coincide with the
Evergreen 3.12.0 release.  These releases were made, albeit with some
difficulty.