Release Schedule for Ubuntu Touch

The LandingTeam is responsible for managing and coordinating Releases of the Ubuntu Phone image on request of the Canonical Product team.

Release preparation requires an archive freeze that usually lasts three/four days until the image promotion has happened.

Requirements

• The Product Team requests an OTA update release every 6 weeks for all officially supported products
• In case another release is required out of the standard timeframe, the Product Team needs to inform the Landing Team at least two weeks before the planned release, also officially announcing it on the mailing list
• The Product Team hands the Landing Team a list of blocking Bugs together with the request for the milestone, this list gets published along with the above email so developers are aware of the urgency of the open issues. This bug list can be modified during the following weeks towards the milestone, the Product team is the gatekeeper for adding/removing bugs.

• During the Release preparation period (see timeline below) the automated Image builds get disabled, silo landings for the targeted distribution get shot down with the exception of regression fixes that were found during image testing. Bugfixes for blocker bugs from the above list have to be in silos before the freeze.

• One week before the Release preparation period a translation freeze is introduced. After the freeze no landings containing changes or additions to user-visible strings will be allowed until after release.

Timeline

Tuesday (US TZ) EOD week before image preparation

• All user visible strings are now landed in the image, no silos with additional string changes are allowed to be released to the archive.

Tuesday (US TZ) EOD on the week of the Milestone

• All blocking bug fixes from the Product team list are in silos so that they can be signed off by QA when the day in the european timezone starts.

Wednesday morning (EU TZ)

• The archive freeze gets called out by the LandingTeam, QA tests the final silos in preparation of the Milestone, in case issues are found the developer will work with the QA and Landing teams to get the silo fixed in time for the Milestone release. Please remember that QA has limited resources and if the number of queued up silos is too big, not all of them will be signed-off and landed for this milestone.

Wednesday afternoon (EU TZ)

• Once all blocker silos have landed a Milestone candidate image is created, automated image builds get shut down.

• The QA team starts a regression test of the candidate image, in case severe regressions are found, the developer of the component gets contacted and a silo with a fix gets prepared. Once the silo lands a new milestone candidate image is prepared.

Friday EOD (US TZ)

• Testing of the candidate image on the desired target architecture is finished, the LandingTeam is notified about the status.

• Image candidate is copied over to the RC channel (ubuntu-touch/rc/*) and handed over to the manufacturers for a final approval.

Monday morning (EU TZ)

• The QA team runs a quick test on the community architectures that will have to be promoted alongside the product image (mako, emulator, etc) and gives a recommendation about releasability of these images to the LandingTeam.

Tuesday evening (EU TZ)

• The manufacturers return feedback regarding the realisability of the OTA.
• A final decision is made based off the decisions of QA, Product management, manufacturers feedback and the Landing Team. The Product Team always have the possibility to veto any of the decisions.

Thursday noon (EU TZ)

• The LandingTeam releases the Milestone. The candidate image is copied from RC to stable for all approved channels and devices (ubuntu-touch/stable/*).

• Automated image builds get enabled again
• Archive landings get resumed again.

Technical Details

Image server operations

En/Disabling automated build (members of the ubuntu-cdimage team):

On the "nusakan" image build machine, become the cdimage user, find your build entry in the crontab and comment it.

ogra@nusakan:~$ sudo -u cdimage -i
cdimage@nusakan:~$ crontab -e

Promoting (members of the ubuntu-cdimage team):

ogra@nusakan:~$ sudo -u cdimage -i
cdimage@nusakan:~$ /srv/system-image.ubuntu.com/bin/copy-image ubuntu-touch/ubuntu-rtm/14.09-proposed ubuntu-touch/ubuntu-rtm/14.09 krillin 59

The above shows the promotion command used to release the proposed krillin image 59 into the 14.09 channel on the "nusakan" image build machine. The command is called in a way that the image version in the target channel will automatically be incremented based on the last image in this channel.