Release model¶

At the top of the file we get the release model, which tells us things like when releases are allowed, what version numbers are allowed, etc.

Team details¶

The “team details” section tells us the PTL and Liaison, so we know who to make sure has acknowledged the request. If one of those people proposed the patch, we can go ahead without any delay. Otherwise we want to make sure one of them knows about the release and approves it so that teams know we aren’t going to release things they know are broken, for example.

Tags¶

Next the report shows the governance tags for the repository. If the request is for a release on a stable branch and the project has that stable:follows-policy tag, there will be a large banner that says the release needs to be approved by the stable team. Releases from master will not include the banner, regardless of whether the deliverable has the tag.

Details for commit receiving new tag X.Y.Z¶

In the “Details for commit receiving new tag…” section (below the DEBUG lines) the report shows what git thinks the previous tag and number of added patches should be. That’s a quick way to verify that we aren’t tagging 1.8.0 after 1.9.0 or something like that.

Check existing tags¶

The next section shows any other tags already on the commit being tagged. Sometimes a team will have a 3-part deliverable but only 1 part changes in a release. If they have defined the 3 parts as 1 deliverable, they should tag all 3 anyway.

All branches with version numbers¶

The next section shows what versions are on all of the branches. This is somewhat important, since for the first release off of master after creating a stable branch we want to make sure we are moving ahead in version numbers. The validation job requires that least the Y value in a X.Y.Z version number is incremented.

Branches containing commit¶

The next step shows which branch(es) contain(s) the commit. That’s useful for ensuring that someone has not merged 2 branches together and we are not releasing off of the wrong branch.

For the current cycle, releases should always come from the master branch. Stable releases should come from the appropriate stable branch.

Relationship to HEAD¶

The “Relationship to HEAD” section tells us if the release will skip any commits. Sometimes someone uses a commit hash locally that is older than the most recent commit on the branch. If this section does not say it is releasing HEAD (Request releases from HEAD), it is good ask the submitter to verify that they’re doing what they mean to be doing. Sometimes they don’t want to release the additional changes, and sometimes they don’t know about them. It is not necessary to take this extra precaution for milestone tags, because those are date-based and it doesn’t really matter if they don’t include everything. We expect a lot of churn and progress around the milestone deadlines.

Open patches, Documentation patches and Patches with Release Notes¶

The next couple of sections show open patches matching various criteria. These are useful close to the release candidate phase of the cycle. When we are close to a freeze date the release team might encourage teams to approve outstanding changes for requirements updates, release notes, and translations before releasing.

Requirements Changes¶

The next two sections, “Requirements Changes…” and “setup.cfg Changes…”, show the dependencies that have changed for the project since the last time it was tagged. We use those to ensure that the exception to the SemVer rules is applied:

• Projects tagging a regular release (not a “pre-release” like an alpha, beta, or rc) need to increment at least the Y part of their version number when the minimum version of a dependency changes or when a new dependency is added.

The report shows the changes to the test requirements as the second part of the “Requirements Changes” section. Those do not trigger Y version changes.

Release X.Y.Z will include¶

The “Release $version will include” section shows the actual changes being included in the new release – the difference since the last version was tagged. This is where the subjective part of the review really comes in. If a patch release is being tagged and something in this list looks like a new feature, we want them to tag a minor update instead. If anything in the list appears to describe a backwards-incompatible change, we want them to tag a major version update.

The git log section gives a more detailed view of the log messages. Look for comments like “delete class X” or “add argument Y to method B” to indicate the release will not be backwards-compatible. It is not necessary to lower a version number, say, if the release does not have new features and has only fixed a bug. Sometimes if there is only one change and it is clearly a bug fix we may ask them to do that, but most of the time releases include a mix of fixes and features.

Another thing to look for is if there are only CI configuration changes. There is no reason to tag a release if the only change was to the zuul or tox configuration, because the end user won’t see those changes. That happens sometimes with the projects that have a script to prepare the release proposal.

The next part of the output (below the Release Notes) shows the same text that will appear in the release announcement email. It is included so that if building that text fails for some reason this job will fail and the reno input files can be fixed instead of having the announce job fail.

Users of $PROJECT¶

The final part of the output is a list of projects that have the current deliverable being released in one of their dependency lists. That section is useful for evaluating the impact of a late release when we’re in the freeze period.