High Level Release Plan

Date Activity
April 24 Create stable-3.2 and release 3.2.0-rc0
May 1 Release 3.2.0-rc1
May 8 Release 3.2.0-rc2
May 18 Release 3.2.0-rc3
May 22 Release 3.2.0-rc4
May 25-29 “Release week” (see below)
June 1 Final release of 3.2.0

Change Acceptance Policy for the Stable Branch

We don’t expect that all ongoing feature development will be completed before the stable branch is created, so we will allow further development to continue on the stable branch to bring features to completion until rc3.

After rc3 only bug fixes will be accepted on the stable branch.

We would prefer that bug fixes are pushed for review directly onto the stable branch, rather than onto master to be cherry-picked back. The reason for this is to avoid that the release managers need to spend time manually checking which changes need to be backported, which could result in changes being overlooked.

“Release Week”

We had initially planned to finalize and make the release during the Spring hackathon, but that has been cancelled due to the ongoing situation with COVID-19.

Instead we will ask community members, particularly those who would have joined the hackathon, to allocate some of their time during the “release week” (25-29 May) to help with finalizing the release

  • test the release candidates
  • report issues
  • triage and troubleshoot incoming bug reports
  • make fixes
  • do code reviews
  • test the latest head of the stable branch

To expedite reviews of Library-Compliance and frontend changes, we will ask Google to make some members available, and we will also ask Matthias Sohn or anyone else from the JGit community to be available to help with JGit related issues.

We have set up a dedicated channel on Slack (#gerrit-32-release) where these activities will be coordinated. It is yet to be confirmed if we will set up any kind of video or voice conferences.

End-to-end Testing

We plan to use the Gatling e2e test framework for Git, developed by GerritForge and Ericsson, to test the stability of the release on a production-like setup on AWS automatically provisioned using the aws-gerrit templates.

End of Life for Gerrit 2.16.x

Per the support policy mentioned on the project homepage, after 3.2.0 is released 2.16.x will reach end of life and will no longer be actively supported, however we plan to make exceptions to this policy for any issues related to the migration to NoteDb.

Support for 3.1.x and 3.0.x will continue; users of 2.16.x or earlier are recommended to upgrade to one of these versions.