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During the Stein PTG in Denver, the release management team talked about ways
we can make things simpler and reduce the "paper pushing" work that all teams
need to do right now. One topic that came up was the usefulness of pushing tags
around milestones during the cycle.

There were a couple of needs identified for doing such "milestone releases":
    1) It tests the release automation machinery to identify problems before
       the RC and final release crunch time.
    2) It creates a nice cadence throughout the cycle to help teams stay on
       track and focus on the right things for each phase of the cycle.
    3) It gives us an indication that teams are healthy, active, and planning
       to include their components in the final release.

One of the big motivators in the past was also to have output that downstream
distros and users could pick up for testing and early packaging. Based on our
admittedly anecdotal small sample, it doesn't appear this is actually a big
need, so we propose to stop tagging milestone releases for the
cycle-with-milestone projects.

We would still have "milestones" during the cycle to facilitate work
organization and create a cadence: teams should still be aware of them, and we
will continue to communicate those dates in the schedule and in the release
countdown emails. But you would no longer be required to request a release for 
each milestone.

Beta releases would be optional: if teams do want to have some beta version
tags before the final release they can still request them - whether on one of
the milestone dates, or whenever there is the need for the project.

Release candidates would still require a tag. To facilitate that step and
guarantee we have a release candidate for every deliverable, the release team
proposes to automatically generate a release request early in the week of the
RC deadline. That patch would be used as a base to communicate with the team:
if a team wants to wait for a specific patch to make it to the RC, someone from
the team can -1 the patch to have it held, or update that patch with a
different commit SHA. If there are no issues, ideally we would want a +1 from
the PTL and/or release liaison to indicate approval, but we would also consider
no negative feedback as an indicator that the automatically proposed patches
without a -1 can all be approved at the end of the RC deadline week.

To cover point (3) above, and clearly know that a project is healthy and should
be included in the coordinated release, we are thinking of requiring a person 
for each team to add their name to a "manifest" of sorts for the release cycle.
That "final release liaison" person would be the designated person to follow
through on finishing out the releases for that team, and would be designated
ahead of the final release phases.

With all these changes, we would rename the cycle-with-milestones release
model to something like cycle-with-rc.

FAQ:
Q: Does this mean I don't need to pay attention to releases any more and the
   release team will just take care of everything?
A: No. We still want teams engaged in the release cycle and would feel much
   more comfortable if we get an explicit +1 from the team on any proposed tags
   or releases.

Q: Who should sign up to be the final release liaison ?
A: Anyone in the team really. Could be the PTL, the standing release liaison,
   or someone else stepping up to cover that role.

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Thanks!
The Release Team