Open Stack

Hello, fellow PTLs,

As Doug did for the past few cycles, I want to start the Pike cycle by
making sure the expectations for communications with the release team
are clear to everyone so there is no confusion or miscommunication about
any of the process or deadlines. This email is being sent to the
openstack-dev mailing list as well as the PTLs of all official OpenStack
projects individually, to improve the odds that all of the PTLs see it.
Note that future release-related emails will *not* be CCed to all
individual PTLs.

(If you were a PTL/release liaison last cycle, feel free to skip ahead
to the "things for you to do right now" section at the end.)

The release liaison for your project is responsible for coordinating
with the release management team, validating your team release requests,
and ensuring that the release cycle deadlines are met. If you don't
nominate a release liaison for your project (something I encourage you
to do), this task falls back to the PTL. Note that release liaisons do
not have to be core reviewers.

Please ensure that your liaison has the time and ability to handle the
communication necessary to manage your release: the release team is here
to facilitate, but finishing the release work is ultimately the
responsibility of the project team. Failing to follow through on a
needed process step may block you from successfully meeting deadlines or
releasing. In particular, our release milestones and deadlines are
date-based, not feature-based. When the date passes, so does the
milestone. If you miss it, you miss it. A few of you ran into problems
in past cycles because of missed communications. My goal is to have all
teams meet all deadlines during Pike. We came very very close for Ocata;
please help by keeping up to date on deadlines.

To ensure smooth coordination, we rely on three primary communication tools:

1. Email, for announcements and asynchronous communication.

The release management team will be using the "[release]" topic tag on
the openstack-dev mailing list for important messages. This includes
weekly countdown emails with details on focus, tasks, and upcoming
dates. As PTL or release liaison, you should ensure that you see and
read those messages (by configuring your mailing list subscription and
email client as needed) so that you are aware of all deadlines, process
changes, etc.

2. IRC, for time-sensitive interactions.

With more than 50 teams involved, the three members of the release team
can't track you each of you down when there is a deadline. We rely on
your daily presence in the #openstack-release IRC channel during
deadline weeks. You are, of course, welcome to stay in channel all the
time, but we need you to be there at least during deadline weeks.

3. Written documentation, for relatively stable information.

The release team has published the schedule for the Pike cycle to
http://releases.openstack.org/pike/schedule.html. Although I will
highlight dates in the countdown emails, you may want to add important
dates from the schedule to your calendar. One way to do that is to
subscribe to the ICS feed for community-wide deadlines:
https://releases.openstack.org/schedule.ics

Note that the Pike cycle overlaps with summer holidays in the northern
hemisphere. If you are planning time off, please make sure your duties
are being covered by someone else on the team. Its best to let the
release team know in advance so we don't delay approval for release
requests from someone we dont recognize, waiting for your +1.

Things for you to do right now:

1. Update your release liaison on
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/CrossProjectLiaisons#Release_management

2. Make sure your IRC nickname and email address listed in
http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/reference/projects.yaml
are correct. The release team, foundation staff, and TC all use those
contact details to try to reach you at important points during the
cycle. Please make sure they are correct, and that the email address
delivers messages to a mailbox you check regularly.

3. Update your mail filters to ensure you see messages sent to the
openstack-dev list with [release] in the subject line.

4. Reply to this message, off-list, to me so I know that you have
received it. A simple “ack” is enough :)

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Release Management PTL