Releasing Breezy

This document describes the processes for making and announcing a Breezy release, and managing the release process. This is just one phase of the overall development cycle, (go re-read this document to ensure it hasn’t been updated since you last read it) but it’s the most complex part.

If you’re doing your first release you can follow this document and read each step explanation. It’s also a good practice to read it for any release to ensure you don’t miss a step and to update it as the release process evolves.

If you’re helping the Release Manager (RM) for one reason or another, you may notice that he didn’t follow that document scrupulously. He may have good reasons to do that but he may also have missed some parts.

Preconditions

  1. Be a member of https://launchpad.net/~brz (or you won’t be able to land any change)

What do we release

In this document, we’re talking about source releases only, packages and installers are built from this but we won’t talk about them here.

Every release is part of a series, brz-3.0.0 is part of series 3.0.

We do two different kind of releases: the betas releases and the stable releases for a given series.

For a given series, releases will be done to deliver new versions of brz to different kinds of users:

  1. beta releases: named x.ybn where x.y is the series and n starts at 1 and is incremented. These releases are targeted to beta testers who don’t want to run from source but are interested in features or improvements.

  2. stable releases: name x.y.z where x.y. is the series and z starts at 0 and is incremented. These releases are targeted at people that want bugfixes only and no new features.

Differences in the release process between beta and stable release will be mentioned when needed.

When do we release ?

As of 2022, we maintain a two series: 3.3 and trunk (4.0).

  1. as much as possible releases should not disturb development, and ongoing development should not disturb releases,

  2. the most recent development series should ideally release once a month during the beta period (see Development cycles for more details),

  3. as capacity allows, the most recent stable series should release every other month (based on the amount of bug fixes, this can be shorter or longer depending on the bugs importance),

  4. previous series should release on a regular basis without interfering with the most recent series with a decreasing order of priority (again this should be based on bugs importance and user feedback),

At the start of a series cycle

To start a new series cycle:

  1. Create a new series x.y at <https://launchpad.net/brz/+addseries>.

  2. Add milestones at <https://launchpad.net/brz/x.y/+addmilestone> to that series for the beta releases and the stable series mentioning their expected dates. Only the milestone associated to the next release in this series should be left active to avoid clutter when targeting bugs.

  3. If you made a new series, you will need to create a new branch for this release series. This branch will be used only from the first non-beta release onwards. It needs to be created by a https://launchpad.net/~brz member (ask the core devs for instructions or to do it for you).

  4. Start a new release-notes file:

    cd doc/en/release-notes
brz cp series-template.txt brz-x.y.txt  # e.g. brz-3.1.txt

  5. Start a new whats-new file:

    cd doc/en/whats-new
brz cp template.txt brz-x.y.txt  # e.g. brz-3.1.txt

  6. Update doc/en/index.txt to point to the new whats-new file.

At the start of a release cycle

To start a new release cycle:

  1. Send mail to the list with the key dates, who will be the release manager, and the main themes or targeted bugs. Ask people to nominate objectives, or point out any high-risk things that are best done early, or that interact with other changes. This is called the metronome mail and is described in Development cycles.

  2. Make a local branch to prepare the release:

    brz branch lp:brz/x.y x.y-dev

    If you’re doing your first beta release, branch from trunk:

    brz branch lp:brz x.y-dev

    Note that you will generally reuse the same branch for all releases in a given series.

  3. Add a landing job for the release branch at https://ci.breezy-vcs.org/

  4. Update the version number in the brz script, and the breezy/__init__.py file:

    version_info = (x, y, z, 'dev', 0)

  5. Add a new section at the top of the current release notes (in doc/en/release-notes) about the new release, including its version number and the headings from release-template.txt.

  6. Update the “What’s New” documents in doc/en/whats-new.

  7. Make sure a milestone exists for your release and that it is active, <https://launchpad.net/brz/x.y> lists the existing milestones, <https://launchpad.net/brz/x.y/x.y.z/+edit> allows you to toggle the active flag.

  8. Commit this and make a proposal against the release branch. Self approve it (you’re the release manager).

Doing a particular release

alpha releases

3.0.0 will start to be released as alpha as integrating plugins and porting to python3 (while maintaining python2 compatiblity) desserve to be testing in the wild by people understanding the risks.

That being said, the whole test suite has been preserved and enriched in the process.

Alpha releases will happen as source only (tarballs) and the process is simplified.

Note that the intent is to come back to beta releases as soon as possible so the alpha releases won’t happen again.

The process for releasing an alpha release is therefore: - upload a tarball to launchpad, - upload a tarball to pypi, - mail bazaar@lists.ubuntu.com,breezy-vcs@googlegroups.com - post an announcement on the home page.

Uploading tarballs are described below, just use alpha versions (3, 0, 0, ‘alpha’, 1) in ./breezy/__init__.py

Update the source code

  1. Check that there is a milestone for the release you’re doing. If there is no milestone it indicates a process problem - make the milestone but also mail the list to raise this issue in our process. Milestones are found at <https://launchpad.net/brz/+milestone/x.y.z>.

  2. Merge into your branch all previous stable series fixes that haven’t been merged yet. For example, if you’re releasing 3.2.x, make sure the fixes on 3.1, 3.0 have already been merged up:

    brz merge lp:brz/3.1

    and commit that merge in its own commit. This should happen only if the devs landing changes in previous releases forgot to merge them up. Since this can slow down the freeze, feel free to gently remind them about their duties ;) If you feel unsafe resolving the conflicts or it’s too time consuming, contact the related devs and skip this merge.

    Alternatively, think about automating these merges.

  3. In the release branch, update version_info in ./breezy/__init__.py. Make sure the corresponding milestone exists. Double check that ./brz _script_version matches version_info. Check the output of ./brz --version.

    For beta releases use:

    version_info = (3, 0, 0, 'beta', SERIAL)

    For instance 3.0b1:

    version_info = (3, 0, 0, 'beta', 1)

    For stable releases use:

    version_info = (3, 0, 0, 'final', 0)

  4. Update the ./doc/en/release-notes/ section for this release.

    Check that all news entries related to this release have been added in the right section. For example, if you’re releasing 3.0b3, the following command should display a a single chuk diff for the 3.0b3 release:

    brz diff -rbrz-3.0b2.. doc/en/release-notes/brz-3.0.txt

    Fill out the date and a description of the release under the existing header (the diff above will help you summarizing). If there isn’t one, follow the instructions above for using the release-template.txt file and remind people that they should document their changes there ;)

    See 3.0b1 or similar for an example of what this looks like.

  5. Add or check the summary of the release into the “What’s New” document.

If this is the first release in a new series make sure to update the introduction mentioning:

  • the date of this first release,

  • until when the series is expected to be supported.

Looking at brz annotate for previous series should give you the right hints. The doc/en/_templates/index.html file should also be updated.

  1. To check that all bugs mentioned in the release notes are actually marked as closed in Launchpad, you can run tools/check-newsbugs.py:

    ./tools/check-newsbugs.py doc/en/release-notes/brz-x.y.txt

    As of 2011-07-18, all bugs mentioned in the output of the script requires some sort of intervention (either changing the status if it’s not ‘Fix Released’ or setting a different milestone if the bug hasn’t been fixed). A few false positives may remain in the older series, don’t let this slow you down too much. This script accepts options you may find useful, use ./tools/check-newsbugs.py to display its usage (-w will open each bug in your browser for example).

  2. For beta releases update the translation template:

    BRZ_PLUGIN_PATH=-site make po/brz.pot

    This is especially important for the final beta release which is when translations are frozen and translators are requested (see The final beta - branching and translations) to make the translations.

  3. For stable releases update the translations:

    brz merge lp:~brz-core/brz/brz-translations-export-x.y

  4. Commit these changes to the release branch, using a command like:

    brz commit -m "Release 3.0.0"

    The diff before you commit will be something like:

    === modified file 'breezy/__init__.py'
--- breezy/__init__.py    2011-02-09 06:35:00 +0000
+++ breezy/__init__.py    2011-03-10 10:24:47 +0000
@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@
 # Python version 2.0 is (2, 0, 0, 'final', 0)."  Additionally we use a
 # releaselevel of 'dev' for unreleased under-development code.

-version_info = (2, 3, 1, 'dev', 0)
+version_info = (2, 3, 1, 'final', 0)

 # API compatibility version
 api_minimum_version = (2, 3, 0)

=== modified file 'doc/en/release-notes/brz-2.3.txt'
--- doc/en/release-notes/brz-2.3.txt      2011-03-09 08:30:16 +0000
+++ doc/en/release-notes/brz-2.3.txt      2011-03-10 10:40:47 +0000
@@ -8,23 +8,10 @@
 brz 2.3.1
 #########

-:2.3.1: NOT RELEASED YET
-
-External Compatibility Breaks
-*****************************
-
-.. These may require users to change the way they use Breezy.
-
-New Features
-************
-
-.. New commands, options, etc that users may wish to try out.
-
-Improvements
-************
-
-.. Improvements to existing commands, especially improved performance
-   or memory usage, or better results.
+:2.3.1: 2011-03-10
+
+This is a bugfix release. Upgrading is recommended for all users of earlier
+2.3 releases.

 Bug Fixes
 *********

=== modified file 'doc/en/whats-new/whats-new-in-2.3.txt'
--- doc/en/whats-new/whats-new-in-2.3.txt 2011-02-03 16:29:18 +0000
+++ doc/en/whats-new/whats-new-in-2.3.txt 2011-03-10 11:10:36 +0000
@@ -17,8 +17,13 @@
 improvements made to the core product, it highlights enhancements within the
 broader Breezy world of potential interest to those upgrading.

-Breezy 2.3.0 is fully compatible both locally and on the network with 2.0 2.1,
-and 2.2, and can read and write repositories generated by all previous
+Breezy 2.3.1 includes all the fixes in the un-released 2.0.7, 2.1.4 and 2.2.5
+versions that weren't included in 2.3.0 and fixes some bugs on its own.
+
+See the :doc:`../release-notes/index` for details.
+
+Breezy 2.3 is fully compatible both locally and on the network with 2.0, 2.1,
+and 2.2. It can read and write repositories generated by all previous
 versions.

 Changed Behaviour

  5. Tag the new release:

    brz tag brz-3.0.0

  6. Push those changes to a brz branch and make a merge proposal:

    brz push

    Use a commit message formatted like:

    Release 3.0.0

    Note that brz push should mention updating one tag (which you just created). If it doesn’t, double-check that you created (and pushed) this tag.

  7. Once the merge proposal has landed, pull down the master release branch.

Making the source tarball

  1. Change into the source directory and run

    make dist

  2. Now we’ll try expanding this tarball and running the test suite to check for packaging problems:

    make check-dist-tarball | subunit2pyunit

    You may encounter failures while running the test suite caused by your locally installed plugins. Use your own judgment to decide if you can release with these failures. When in doubt, disable the faulty plugins one by one until you get no more failures. Alternatively, you can use BRZ_DISABLE_PLUGINS or BRZ_PLUGIN_PATH=-site to disable one or all plugins.

    Remember that this branch has already been tested on https://ci.breezy-vcs.org, this step is particularly testing that the cython extensions, which are updated by your local cython version when you run make dist, are in good shape.

Publishing the source tarball

  1. Go to the relevant <https://launchpad.net/brz/x.y> series page in Launchpad.

  2. Create a release of the milestone, and upload the source tarball and the GPG signature. Or, if you prefer, use the tools/packaging/lp-upload-release script to do this. Note that this changes what the download widget on the Launchpad brz home page shows, so don’t stop the release process yet, or platform binary installers won’t be made and the download list will stay very small! <https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/586445>

  3. Run twine to upload to pip:

    twine upload breezy-*.tar.gz breezy-*.tar.gz.asc

Kick off the next cycle

From that point, there is no possible return, the tarball has been uploaded so you can relax a bit.

You’re still holding a “social” lock on the launchpad branch though. Until your start the next cycle, nobody should land anything on this branch. If they do, they either targeted the wrong branch or didn’t update the news file correctly, so the sooner the branch is opened again, the better.

This matters more for lp:brz than for lp:brz/x.y, lp:brz should always be open for landing, so you should do At the start of a release cycle as soon as possible (i.e. update the version number in brz and breezy/__init__, create/update the news files and create/update the milestone for the next relase).

You may also need to do At the start of a series cycle if you’re starting a new series.

The final beta - branching and translations

A word of caution: the instructions above works well for all releases but there is one special case that requires a bit more care: when you release the last beta for a given x.y series (from trunk aka lp:brz), you need to setup two branches for the next cycle:

  1. lp:brz needs to be opened for the next series x.(y+1).

  2. lp:brz/x.y needs to be opened for the next release x.y.0 in the series. Since this is first real use of lp:brz/x.y, this is also the deadline for the https://ci.breezy-vcs.org/ landing job to be created.

Both are important as lp:brz should remain open so any change can be landed, lp:brz/x.y on the other hand should be ready to receive bug fixes.

lp:brz is generally more important as the bug fixes on lp:brz/x.y won’t be released sooner than a month from now whereas people may already been waiting to land on lp:brz.

In a nutshell:

  1. Open lp:brz for x.(y+1)

  2. Create https://ci.breezy-vcs.org/ landing job and/or update the lp:brz/x.y branch based on whatever revision you want to release.

  3. Release x.y.0 from lp:brz/x.y

  4. Open lp:brz/x.y for bug fixes

You also need to ensure Launchpad is set up to import/export translations for the new branch and inform translators.

  1. Push the last beta release to a new branch:

    brz push lp:~brz-core/brz/brz-translations-export-x.y

  2. On the translations series synchronization settings page <https://translations.launchpad.net/brz/x.y/+translations-settings> turn on Import template files then for exports click Choose a target branch and point it at the branch you just pushed.

  3. E-mail translators to announce that the forthcoming stable release of brz is ready for translations. Send to launchpad-translators@lists.launchpad.net and ubuntu-translators@lists.ubuntu.com.

  4. The series is now frozen for strings and API, see below for adding that to the announcement.

Announcing the source freeze

  1. Post to the bazaar@lists.ubuntu.com list and breezy-vcs@googlegroups.com , saying that the source has been frozen. Be extra clear that this is only a source release targeted at packagers and installer builders (see <https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/645084>). This is the cue for platform maintainers and plugin authors to update their code. This is done before the general public announcement of the release.

    The freeze announcement generally guess the date of the official public announcement, for the most recent stable series (the one supported by the installers and most of the distributions) it’s generally a few days after the freeze. For older series supported only via SRUs for Ubuntu, we don’t control the process as tightly so guessing the date is not appropriate.

    For the final beta release include in your announcement a notice of API and translation freezes noting that public methods should not be removed or changed and strings should not be added or changed.

  2. Pause for a few days.

Publishing the release

There is normally a delay of a few days after the source freeze to allow for binaries to be built for various platforms. Once they have been built, we have a releasable product. The next step is to make it generally available to the world.

  1. Go to the release web page at <https://launchpad.net/brz/x.y/x.y.z>

  2. Announce on the Breezy website.

  3. Check that the documentation for this release is available on https://www.breezy-vcs.org/doc/en/.

    This documentation is currently generated by a cron job run by Jelmer.

Announcing the release

Now that the release is publicly available, tell people about it.

  1. Make an announcement mail.

    For beta releases, this is sent to the bazaar@lists.ubuntu.com and bazaar-announce@lists.ubuntu.com lists.

    For stable releases (excluding SRUs which are for older stable releases), it should also be cc’d to info-gnu@gnu.org, python-announce-list@python.org, bug-directory@gnu.org.

    In all cases, it is good to set Reply-To: bazaar@lists.ubuntu.com, so that people who reply to the announcement don’t spam other lists.

    The announce mail will look something like this:

    Subject: brz x.y.z released!

The Breezy team is happy to announce availability of a new
release of the brz adaptive version control system.

Breezy is a fork of the Bazaar version control system.

<<Summary paragraph from news>>

Thanks to everyone who contributed patches, suggestions, and
feedback.

Breezy is now available for download from
https://launchpad.net/brz/x.y/x.y.z/ as a source tarball; packages
for various systems will be available soon.

<<release notes from this release back to the last major release>>

    Feel free to tweak this to your taste.

  2. Make an announcement through <https://launchpad.net/brz/+announce> mentioning the milestone URL <https://launchpad.net/brz/+milestone/x.y.z> so people get an easy access to details.

  3. Update http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breezy_(software) – this should be done for the stable and beta releases.

  4. Update the python package index: <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/breezy>

    From the tarball created and tested earlier

    twine upload ../breezy-3.0.0.tar.gz ../breezy-3.0.0.tar.gz.asc

    Remember to check the results afterward – this should be done for stable releases but not for beta releases nor SRUs.

    The twine command is provided by the twine package on Debian and Ubuntu. Beware that you need at least twine-1.10.

    If in doubt, you can test with <https://testpypi.python.org/pypi> where you can register yourself, register the brz project and upload (and then remove the upload and delete the project so a new release manager can enjoy the same facilities). If the project already exists, have one of the existing owners of the project add you to the group.

    To use the pypi test site, you need to record your credentials for an existing user (the registration process is manual and starts at <https://testpypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=register_form>.

    Once registered, you can record your crdentials in your ~/pypirc file with

    [testpypi]
username:<login on testpypi>
password:<password on testpypi>
repository = https://testpypi.python.org/pypi

    Registering the breezy project if doesn’t exist is achieved with:

    python setup.py -r https://testpypi.python.org/pypi register

Uploading is done with:

 twine upload -r testpypi ../breezy-3.0.0.tar.gz ../breezy-3.0.0.tar.gz.asc

To be able to upload the release you must create an account on
<http://pypi.python.org/pypi> and have one of the existing owners of the
project add you to the group and update your ``[pypi]`` section in your
``~/.pypirc`` file.

Merging the released code back to trunk

Merge the release branch back into the trunk. The doc/en/release-notes changes should be merged into the right place because each release series has its own release-notes file, but double-check.

If it’s not already done, advance the version number in brz and breezy/__init__.py. File a merge proposal against lp:brz.

As soon as you change the version number in trunk, make sure you have created the corresponding milestone to ensure the continuity in bug targeting or nominating. Depending on the change, you may even have to create a new series (if your change the major or minor release number), in that case go to At the start of a series cycle and follow the instructions from there.

Releases until the final one

Congratulations - you have made your first release. Have a beer or fruit juice - it’s on the house! If it was a beta, you’re not finished yet. Another beta or hopefully a stable release is still to come.

The process is the same as for the first release. Goto Doing a particular release and follow the instructions again. Some details change between beta and stable releases, but they should be documented. If the instructions aren’t clear enough, please fix them.

Getting the release into Ubuntu

/!Nothing in this section has been validated for breezy yet.

(Feel free to propose or add new sections here about what we should do to get brz into other places.)

For the currently-under-development release of Ubuntu, no special action is needed: the release should be picked by Debian and synced from there into Ubuntu.

Releases off stable brz branches should go in to the -updates of the Ubuntu release that originally contained that branch. (Ubuntu Lucid had brz 2.2.0, so should get every 2.2.x update.) This means going through the SRU (Stable Release Updates) process.

Since September 2010, brz has received approval by the technical board for the MicroReleaseExceptions category so that whole bugfix releases can more easily be approved.

Progress on these realeases is tracked on the SRU wiki page.

After making a brz stable-release release, nominate the most serious bug for the appropriate Ubuntu release and subscribe the `ubuntu-sru` team.

This requires a couple of tricks (please reconsider and tweak as things evolves from one release to the other):

  • create a distro task with the Also affects distribution button and select brz (Ubuntu).

  • change the URL to point to ubuntu/+source/brz instead of brz (this is needed if you create the distro task but not if it exists already). You should now be able to click the Nominate for release button and select the right Ubuntu release. As of September 2010, this means:

  • quantal for the 2.6 series,

  • precise for the 2.5 series,

  • oneiric for the 2.4 series,

  • natty for the 2.3 series,

  • maverick for the 2.2 series,

  • lucid for the 2.1 series,

  • Subscribe the ~ubuntu-sru team to the bug.

  • Add a comment targeted to ~ubuntu-sru explaining the expectations (we are targeting running the test suite during the build which, as of September 2010, fails for known reasons that are currently addressed). Search for bugs tagged with sru for examples and don’t forget to tag the bug you selected.

See also