High Level Release Plan

Date Activity
Sep 30 Create stable-3.7 branch, Release ‘3.7.0-rc0’
Oct 7 Release 3.7.0-rc1
Oct 14 Release 3.7.0-rc2
Oct 21 Release 3.7.0-rc3 - Feature freeze deadline
Oct 28 Release 3.7.0-rc4
Nov 4 Release 3.7.0-rc5
Nov 7-9 Gerrit Hackathon
Nov 9 Final release of 3.7.0
Nov 10-11 Gerrit User Summit 2022

Moving to Discord

The Gerrit Code Review community has moved to Discord and the Gerrit v3.7 release uses a dedicated channel gerrit-3_7-release for the coordination and collaboration on the all the activities associated with the release.

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 the completion of existing features on the stable branch to bring features to completion until rc3.

The development of new features is very rarely accepted on the stable branch as it may compromise the stability of the release.

After rc3 only E2E test and associated 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.

Gerrit Hackathon

The Gerrit hackathon is planned during the release week, sponsored and hosted by GerritForge Ltd in London.

We also encourage all the JGit contributors and committers to join the event.

We will also ask the community members to allocate some of their time during the hackathon 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 in the EU time-zone.

NOTE: for all of those who cannot travel or is still blocked by travelling restrictions GerritForge will setup a remote collaboration channel where anyone around the world could join the hackathon remotely.

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.

GerritForge has also offered its own AWS infrastructure to test the scalability of Gerrit v3.7, particularly with medium to large sized projects and in a multi-primary setup.

The Gerrit-CI has also an automated aws-gerrit pipeline that will be pointed to the stable-3.7 branch and run on a daily basis.

End of Life for Gerrit 3.4.x

Per the support policy mentioned on the project homepage, after 3.7.0 is released 3.4.x will reach end of life and will no longer be actively supported, which also means that the CI will drop the support for builds and validations with Java 8.

Support for 3.5.x and 3.6.x will continue as usual. Users of 3.4.x or earlier are recommended to upgrade to one of these versions.