Provide RCs for ansible major releases?

Archives Ansible Developer
1

Hi

I just wanted to make a suggestion for the next major release.

We all know, unit testing software which is close to systems (also see Linux kernel) is hard to test. I think Linus does a good job for providing RCs and let users know, the code should be production ready in the near future and we should test it.

What you you think about providing one or two RCs before the final release so the community can test them in their environments?

Regards
René

2

Hi Rene,

According to our surveys, currently about 20% of users (which is an insanely large number of people) consume the development branch directly. As such, a release candidate is not neccessary, as you can just “checkout; source ./hacking/env-setup” and try your current playbooks on the latest development branch.

One of the most awesome things about our community is testing of the latest branch is near-continuous.

We would definitely welcome you to do the same if you were interested.

–Michael

3

Hi Michael

I am using branch devel too but I am pulling only from time to time, so it would kick my ass to actually test the RC.

Regards
René

4

Hi guys,

I’ve run very large projects before. When release candiates are cut, testing is never as good as a full release. The folks testing on the devel branch prior to the release are EXTREMELY strong at doing so.

We would do it if we felt the effort were worthwhile. Please trust us on our observations and our judgement calls in this regard.

–Michael

5

I've run very large projects before. When release candiates are cut,
testing is never as good as a full release. The folks testing on the
devel branch prior to the release are EXTREMELY strong at doing so.

One clarification, though: The devel branch has fixes that aren't
necessarily going to be in the next release, right? That might lead to
some differences in testing (e.g. if leaving out some devel changes, when
the release is tagged, causes some things to stop working), although if
you say that it hasn't been an issue, I'm relatively happy to believe you. :^)

                                      -Josh (jbs@care.com)

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6

We generally try to cherry-pick all fixes we can to release branches.

There may be some rare exceptions.

Right now I don’t have a plan for a 1.7.2 in mind, but we may decide to cut one in a few weeks just because we feel like a series should have a reasonable amount of bugfixes included in it :slight_smile: … Most likely done when most of the P2 bug reports and bugfix pull requests get smited.