Open Stack

Hi everyone,

We are less than two months away from the final release date for 
"Mitaka". Most of the release process is now driven by the 
openstack/releases repository, and we have taken a much less aggressive 
approach to driving the release cycle. But there are still a number of 
things the release team needs to ensure, like making dead sure we have a 
release of your project to include in the "final release" on April 7th. 
What does that mean ?


For projects following the cycle-with-milestones model:
=======================================================

The release team needs you to publish *at least one* release candidate 
before April 1st, so that we have something to publish on the final 
release date.

To ensure you achieve that goal in time, the release team recommends you 
follow the following release process:

* Between March 1 and March 3 you will request (through 
openstack/releases) a .0b3 version to mark the mitaka-3 milestone. This 
will mark the start of your pre-release feature-frozen period.
* Between mitaka-3 and your RC1 tag, your focus should be on tying up 
the last loose ends, identifying release-critical bugs and getting them 
fixed.
* We recommend limiting the number of feature freeze exceptions to the 
strict minimum. There is one week less between FF and final release this 
time, so the focus should really be on bug fixing immediately after 
mitaka-3 !
* When you closed all the release-critical issues and are ready to 
publish a release candidate (which will expose the proposed release to a 
wider audience), request a .0rc1 version. This should ideally happen the 
week of March 14.
* From that tag the release team will cut a release branch that we can 
use for pre-release backports and further release candidates. The master 
branch switches to Newton development.
* If you request other release candidates (on the release branch) before 
April 1st, we'll tag them and include them in the final release instead 
of using the RC1.


For projects following the cycle-with-intermediary model:
=========================================================

The release team needs you to publish at least one version before April 
1st, so that we have something to include in the final release on the 
following week.

To ensure that, the release team recommends that every 
intermediary-released project does at least one release in the Mitaka 
cycle before the mitaka-3 milestone (it can still do another release 
between then and April 1st and if you do we'll include that one in the 
"final" instead).

The following projects have *not* published any intermediary release 
during Mitaka yet and should really plan to do at least one in the 
coming 3 weeks:

ceilometermiddleware
cliff
cloudkitty
cloudkitty-dashboard
coreos-image-builder
django-openstack-auth-kerberos
manila-ui
os-vif
os-win
python-barbicanclient
python-brick-cinderclient-ext
python-cloudkittyclient
python-saharaclient
python-searchlightclient
python-solumclient
solum
solum-dashboard
solum-infra-guestagent


For projects following the independent model:
=============================================

You don't need to do anything since the project does not follow the 
cycle and therefore will not be part of the "mitaka" final release.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)