[Evergreen-dev] Evergreen release discussion and an offer

[Lussier, Kathy]

Hi all,

Thank you to Blake, Bill, Shula, Stephanie and Andrea for volunteering to
work on the next release team!

In addition to forming a release team, yesterday's dev meeting also
featured more discussion about a long-term vision of how the community
should handle releases. There was  talk of bringing the discussion to the
mailing list or to the dev hackfest.

I'm not in a position to help much with releases these days, but I think I
can help in another way. I would like to extend an offer to the
developer community to serve in the role of  facilitator for a big-picture
discussion on releases during the dev hackfest. Given that we would be
meeting over Zoom, we could also schedule this talk for any old day outside
of the conference schedule if people prefer hacking on the hackfest day. My
goal is to facilitate a session that results in real outcomes and action
items that move us towards a model that works best for our community.

If the developers are on board with this idea, I will set up a wiki page
where we can add suggested topics that should be covered during the
discussioni. To start, I think the following topics could be included:
time-based versus feature-based release, the frequency of major releases
(if we continue with time-based releases), the frequency of point releases,
and whether we need to continue building tarballs. I will add that I'm
disinclined to discuss release naming conventions as I don't think release
names make much of an impact on how our libraries use the software. You all
can overrule me on that disinclination if you disagree with me.

I think the timing will be good as we will also have input from the larger
community that is coming about through the strategic planning process.

I also want to correct a statement I made yesterday when I said  know this
community is capable of consistent releases that are not always late. What
I really should have said is that I know this community is capable of
coming up with a release model that works for the current group of
contributors who make these releases happen. I think now is a good time to
stop talking about the people who used to make the current model work and
are no longer part of the community or actively involved. We have a whole
new group of core committers and we also have new contributors getting
involved in the release process. From what I've heard, Galen's guidance was
invaluable during the last release in getting people to understand how a
release is built. There is a lot of great energy out there, and I'm
confident that this group of contributors, working with more experienced
hands, will come up with something that works in our current environment.

Thanks for listening!
Kathy


--
Kathy Lussier
she/her
Executive Director
NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange
Danvers, MA
978-777-8844 x201
www.noblenet.org
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