Ubuntu Wiki

To be carried out by: LaMont Jones and Ubuntu Release Manager

Goals

• Unblock development process for new release as quickly as possible.
• Prepare for first milestone CD release.

Stages

Bugs related to this process are tagged with new-release-cycle-process. If you discover new glitches or things that can be automated, please file a bug with that tag.

Previous release minus 1 month

1. Contact Soyuz development/production teams to ensure there are no known outstanding issues that will prevent on-time opening of the new distroseries.
2. Remind toolchain developers to begin preparing the new toolchain.
3. Confirm final schedule for the new release and communicate key release dates
   • Create codenameReleaseSchedule page

   • Update ReleaseSchedule

   • Update Fridge calendar?
   • Canonical calendars

Previous release minus 2 weeks

1. Double-check with Soyuz development/production teams.

2. Ask for the maillist distroseries-changes to be set up by sending email to ubuntu-platform@rt.canonical.com to file an RT ticket.

Previous release plus 1 day

1. Change driver (a.k.a. "Release manager") for previous distroseries to ubuntu-core-devby https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/distroseries/+driver.

2. Create new seed branches based on those for the previous release, and push them to the appropriate subdirectories of bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/.

3. Notify Colin Watson to set up seed mirrors and germinate output for the new distroseries.

4. Reject any queued uploads to RELEASE pocket of previous distroseries.

5. Disable the Soyuz publisher cron jobs.

6. Notify a Launchpad admin to create new distroseries with status FROZEN. (Note that at the moment this breaks some parts of Launchpad until the new distroseries is initialised, so do this as close to running initialise-from-parent as possible.)

7. Create a milestone named ubuntu-$version in the release

8. Check that the new distroseries exists with status FROZEN, and that the previous distroseries has status CURRENT.

9. Create symbolic links /srv/launchpad.net/ubuntu-archive/ubuntu-misc/more-extra.override.DSN.restricted -> more-extra.override.DSN.main, /srv/launchpad.net/ubuntu-archive/ubuntu-misc/more-extra.override.DSN.universe -> more-extra.override.DSN.main, and /srv/launchpad.net/ubuntu-archive/ubuntu-misc/more-extra.override.DSN.multiverse -> more-extra.override.DSN.main on cocoplum, where DSN is the new distroseries name.

10. Notify Soyuz production team to run lp_publish:$ LPCONFIG=ftpmaster ./scripts/ftpmaster-tools/initialise-from-parent.py -a amd64,armel,i386,powerpc <new-distroseries-name> on cocoplum (takes around 8 minutes).

    • If the set of active architectures changed in the previous cycle, update the comma-separated list passed to the -a option.

11. Notify James Westby/Jonathan Lange to initialize the branches for the new series.

12. Run the publisher once: lp_publish:$ LPCONFIG=ftpmaster-publish ./scripts/publish-distro.py -d ubuntu -vv -A -s DSN -s DSN-updates -s DSN-security -s DSN-proposed -s DSN-backports where DSN is the new distroseries name. This run will create the proper archive indexes for all suites (takes around 25 minutes).

13. Compare dists trees for previous and current distroseries and sign off on any differences; the only differences should be the distroseries name, that custom uploads (installer-*, dist-upgrader-all, and i18n) are missing from dists/DSN/main, and that Release.gpg does not yet exist (this will be created when the full publisher cron job next runs).

    • ~lp_archive/bin/compare-archives or other tools may be useful for this - XXX nominate one and install in a standard location on cocoplum

14. Make sure that no packages are pending publication in DSN's partner repository (use lp-remove-package.py to remove all source packages currently published in the previous distroseries), since the partner team does not want these to be propagated automatically. (Julian Edwards has promised to change Launchpad's default behaviour here. [This is indeed fixed now, please remove this comment once you've verified it works for Natty opening. --Julian])

15. Similarly, run the publisher once for the partner repository: lp_publish:$ LPCONFIG=ftpmaster-publish ./scripts/publish-distro.py -d ubuntu -vv -A -s DSN -s DSN-updates -s DSN-security -s DSN-proposed -s DSN-backports --partner -R /srv/launchpad.net/ubuntu-archive/ubuntu-partner/dists; compare and sign off on any differences. Due to the previous step, the new Packages and Sources files should be empty.

16. Run the script to initialize the package sets from the previous release.
17. Re-enable the Soyuz publisher cron jobs and wait for the first run to complete.

18. Verify that the partner repository has been created on archive.canonical.com as a result of this process; if not, notify the Soyuz developers to fix it and check that this happens.

19. Prepare and upload new buildd chroots.

20. Notify rosetta@launchpad.net to open Launchpad translations for the new distroseries.

21. Notify Colin Watson to modify various reports (britney, anastacia, jessica) to point to the new distroseries.

22. Notify Scott James Remnant to set up merge-o-matic to point to the new distroseries.

23. Notify toolchain developers to upload new toolchain. Iterate uploads as necessary until this has successfully built on all architectures.

24. Notify a Launchpad admin to set the status of the new distroseries to DEVELOPMENT.

25. Notify a Launchpad admin to enable PPAs for the new distroseries by enabling virtualization support on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/DSN/{i386,amd64}/+admin

26. Check with James Westby/Jonathan Lange that the new branches are available.

27. Inform #ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-devel-announce that the new release is now open for uploads, pointing to merge-o-matic output.

28. Create data/RELEASE, tools/RELEASE, and tools/boot/RELEASE directories in debian-cd based on corresponding directories for the previous release. Set OFFICIAL to "Alpha" in CONF.sh for the new release. Adjust cdimage code to be aware of the new release.

29. Ask LaMont Jones to bootstrap the build-RELEASE-live chroot on the buildds for the livefs builds

30. Update UbuntuDevelopment, ArchiveAdministration to reflect the code name of the current release

31. Notify Michael Vogt to update the default release in popcon.ubuntu.com and update the component list

32. Notify a member of the InstallerTeam to add the introductory message back to Ubiquity.

33. Notify James Westby to enable kerneloops.
34. Target issues from the previous release's release notes to be fixed in the new release.

First weeks, after toolchain complete

1. Merge base-files if necessary and change /etc/issue, /etc/issue.net, and /etc/lsb-release to refer to the new release.

2. Merge debootstrap if necessary and create a bootstrap script for the new release as a copy of the previous one (currently, we can just make the new one a symlink to gutsy, as it hasn't changed since then).

3. Merge devscripts, lintian, vim, emacs-goodies-el, and system-tools-backends if necessary and update lists of Ubuntu release names to include the new release name.

4. Update /usr/share/python-apt/templates/Ubuntu.info in python-apt to include the new release name.

5. Merge cdrom-detect, choose-mirror, and iso-scan if necessary and update cdrom/suite and /mirror/suite debconf templates to include a choice for the new release and update any previous default.

6. Merge the rest of the installer in dependency order, ending with debian-installer once all other installer components have built successfully on all architectures.

7. Notify oem-config and ubiquity maintainer(s) to run debian/rules update, adjust as necessary to account for changes, and upload.

8. Turn live filesystem and cdimage cron jobs back on.

9. Add the date of the previous release to calendar.ubuntu in bsdmainutils

10. QA team will triage the +nominations bugs list, declining non-SRU candidate nominations and re-target bugs. The release team will evaluate the remaining list, accepting good SRU candidates

11. Continue on MilestoneProcess.

CategoryProcess