Release engineering

To forge a successful stable release of the Haiku operating system, several important tasks must be accomplished. These steps are time tested as a best roadmap to draft a successful release of Haiku.

=> Critical Milestones

=> Community Concensus

=> Scramle. Enhancement Deadline

=> Branch

=> Configure CI/CD Pipelines

=> Testing

=> Finalization

=> Distribution

=> After the release

Important first steps

• Review blockers for the next release in

=> Trac

• Active members of the

=> contributors group

should reach concensus on the need for a stable release* We try to have a release every year, but blocker tickets can prevent this from happening

• It’s difficult to commit to strictly time-based releases because the available time of unpaid developers is unpredictable

• Community nomination of a Release Coordinator* Should be someone from the contributors group

• Should have visibility of most aspects of Haiku

• Should have good coordination and communication skills

• Generally occurs via the haiku-development mailing list

• Timeline proposals are proposed via the haiku-development mailing list

General Rules

• Don’t rush the release. Better delay it a bit and take the time to make sure everything is ok.

• Make sure the final image is really well tested.

• Start planning early. Getting the release ready takes time. Waiting until a new release is urgent is a bad idea.

• There will be another release. Maybe some big changes are too risky to integrate now, and should wait until the next release.

Forming a timeline

An important aspect of drafting a release is forming a timeline. The Release Coordinator’s role is to drive Haiku towards this release date.

• Final date for enhancements in (RELEASE)

• Branch buildtools for (RELEASE)

• Branch haiku for (RELEASE)

• Setup CI/CD pipelines for (RELEASE)

• Generate first test candidates (TC0, TC1, etc), encourage extreme testing.

• Begin accepting bugfixes in branches via code review

• Final translations synchronization

• Generate first release candidates (RC0, RC1, etc), encourage testing.

• Profit

• R1/Beta 2’s timeline from branch to release was roughly 35 days

• R1/Beta 3’s timeline from branch to release was roughly 50 days.

Release dates can slide, it’s ok. We just try to slide pragmatically (+1 week because of X,Y,Z)