Policy for releases of the core snap

This post clarifies the core release process as outlined by @JamieBennett:

  • Nothing goes to the stable channel unless it has been in the candidate channel first.
  • Only @fgimenez can make a stable release (or someone nominated by Federico in his absence).
  • Only @fgimenez can make a candidate channel release (or someone nominated by him in his absence).
  • Only @mvo can make a beta channel release (or someone nominated by him in his absence).
  • All releases to the stable channel must:
    • Have sign off from QA and the Core Team
    • Have sign off from CE, unless this holds up the release for more than 2 days
    • Have release notes and an announcement email
    • Have accompanying test results stored somewhere
    • Have a comprehensive change log stored somewhere
    • Be tagged in GitHub
    • Be released on Mondays and only when the Release Manager and QA are available (unless an emergency occurs).
  • If a release fails to validate in beta or candidate we iterate on it until it passes (no skipping to the next planned release)
  • People who want to test the latest can still get that from edge, those that want less of a risk but want more frequent releases can use beta.
  • We must assume that the candidate and stable channels are for people who do not sign up to a level of risk above that of normal software bugs and are likely to use our software in a commercial environment
  • A day before the release goes out the store team must be notified so that they can prepare for the download impact
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Do we have a group of people from CE defined here we ask or are we doing that at our regular two-week meeting?

@morphis we use the snap-update-verification mailinglist for this right now, however I would prefer if we could use the forum instead.

Depends, there might be things we can’t mention in the public so I would prefer the private ML for CE approvals.

Note that we’ve suggested the CE cert team signs off on core snaps in Beta channel, and the CE QA team will then sign off on core snaps from candidate -> stable. And +1 to Simon’s suggestion to continue using the mailing list for CE approvals.