Ubuntu Wiki

To be carried out by: Ubuntu Release Manager, with support from the Ubuntu release team

Goals:

• Produce a comprehensive, thoroughly tested release intended for final publication
• Execute a complete functional test of the release process in preparation for the final release

RC minus 14 days:

1. Notify kernel team of KernelFreeze

RC minus 10 days:

1. Notify developers by mailing ubuntu-devel-announce:

   • Pointer to milestone page
   • Reminder of freeze
   • Target any relevant bugs to the milestone
2. Review problems and file targeted bugs for those which need resolution for the release candidate:

   • PackageInconsistencies

   • Live filesystem build failures
   • Upgrade failures
   • Oversized ISOs
3. Merge seeds and update metapackages for all derivatives

4. Notify Michael Vogt to perform a GnomeAppInstallDesktopDatabaseUpdate

5. Notify James Troup to remind mirrors to check free disk space
   • Include estimate of disk space requirements for pre-publishing the release candidate

6. Begin UpgradeTestingProcess

RC minus 7 days:

1. All CD-related problems should be resolved

   • PackageInconsistencies

   • Live filesystem build failures

   • Clear the NBS list.

2. Announce the freeze on the #ubuntu-devel topic and ubuntu-devel-announce. There is generally no need to tell people to hold off on uploads, as they will be held automatically by Soyuz once the next task is performed.

3. Set the distrorelease status to FROZEN in Launchpad

4. Review problems and file targeted bugs for those which need resolution for the release:
   • Installation bugs
   • Upgrade bugs
   • High-severity bugs
5. Selectively accept package uploads to resolve targeted bugs

RC minus 3 days:

1. Stop all live filesystem and cdimage cron jobs

2. Modify debian-cd/CONF.sh to set OFFICIAL="Release Candidate" (Edit from bzr co bzr+ssh://antimony.canonical.com/srv/cdimage.ubuntu.com/bzr/debian-cd/ and pull from /srv/cdimage.ubuntu.com/debian-cd on antimony)

3. Go through ReleaseChecklist

4. Produce a full set of images

5. Notify QA team (Marjo Mercado) to begin ReleaseValidationProcess

6. Notify QA team (Marjo Mercado) and ask for re-certification on test hardware
7. Iteratively test and accept select showstopper fixes

8. Ask the marketing team (ubuntu-marketing@lists.ubuntu.com) to prepare a web page about the changes since the last milestone. Please cc matthew.nuzum@canonical.com and gerry.carr@canonical.com

9. Notify web team (Matthew Nuzum) to ensure that the release notes redirection table on http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes is up to date

RC minus 2 days:

1. Receive certification test results from Marc Tardif
2. Prepare the release announcement
   • Notify Jonathan Riddell, Jonathan Carter for Kubuntu and Edubuntu inputs

   • Review -changes mailing list since the last milestone to make sure that all relevant major changes have been documented in the milestone's web page

   • this should refer to the web page prepared by the doc team rather than going into details of changes itself
   • update the page to include any caveats

   • request that contributors to release notes (TechnicalOverview) provide links to upstream project web pages and change logs in their entries, where appropriate.

   • notify loco teams to translate release notes (coordinate with Matthew Nuzum; URLs should be https://wiki.ubuntu.com/<releasenotepath>/<lang> for all languages)

   • obtain up-to-date list of triggered release mirrors from Canonical sysadmin

   • Notify Matt Zimmerman, ubuntu-doc@lists.ubuntu.com to proofread the announcement and suggest changes, CC product owners (Rick Spencer, Jos Boumans, David Mandala) and Marketing (Gerry Carr).

3. Review targeted bugs and take final decisions on what to fix and what to defer

Night before release:

1. Pre-publish ISOs (for CDs only): ./publish-image-set.py --prepublish (from lp:ubuntu-archive-tools) will print the necessary commands.

RC minus 15 minutes:

1. Copy the beta release from releases.ubuntu.com, by moving all *-beta-* in .pool directories under /srv/cdimage.ubuntu.com/www/simple to directories under /srv/cdimage.ubuntu.com/old-images/. If requested by IS, also remove these files after archival; note that this will leave releases.ubuntu.com without any visible images for this release for a short while.

2. Publish the CD images: ./publish-image-set.py will print the necessary commands.

   • You need to edit cdimage/www/simple/HEADER.html, cdimage/www/simple/kubuntu/HEADER.html, cdimage/www/simple/.htaccess, and cdimage/www/simple/kubuntu/.htaccess by hand to change "Beta" to "Release Candidate", since neither publish-release nor publish-image-set.py is yet smart enough to do the right thing there.

3. Copy .manifest to .manifest.full, pruning all images from previous releases from the .manifest file to allow timely mirror probing.
4. Remove any not-yet-official warnings from the announcement and release notes
5. Verify that all mirrors listed in the announcement or release notes have images, and remove faulty mirrors
6. Check torrents for proper functionality

RC release:

1. Update the topic on #ubuntu-devel

2. Notify Matthew Nuzum to put the announcement on the website
   • News sidebar

   • /testing

3. Send the release announcement to ubuntu-announce

4. Post an announcement on http://release-blog.ubuntu.com/

5. Post announcement to Launchpad (ubuntu-drivers members have posting rights)

RC plus 1 day:

1. Continue on ReleaseProcess

2. If any changes were made to this document in this run, check whether the changes also apply to MilestoneProcess, BetaProcess or ReleaseProcess.

CategoryProcess