Basecoin is the heart of most demo apps and the testnets, but the last few releases have been a little chaotic. In order to guarantee a higher, production-quality release in the future, we will work on a release process to check before the push to master. This is a work-in-progress and should be trialed on the 0.6.x patches, and used for the 0.7.0 release.
This is a rough-guide. Please add comments here, let's try it out for 0.6.1 and see what is annoying and useless, and what is missing and useful.
- Create issues (and invite others to do so)
- Create WIP PR for release as placeholder
- Clarify scope of release in text
- Create labels, eg. (0.6.1 and 0.6.x)
- Tag all issues for this release with 0.6.1
- Other, less urgent enhancements should get the 0.6.x label
- Freeze tagging more issues for this release
- Update PR to note this
- If you want an exception, you need a good excuse ;)
- Handle all issues
- Write code
- Update CHANGELOG
- Review and merge
- Update version
- Remove WIP flag on PR
- Organize QA
- Prepare blog post (optional for patch/bugfix releases?)
Once we have a PR for the release and think it is ready, we should test it out internally:
- Code review
- Hopefully dealt with by individual code reviews on the merged issues
- A general run-through is always good to find dead-code, things to cleanup
- Review blog post (and run-through)
- Manual run-through of tutorials (and feedback on bad UX)
- Deployment of a private testnet, multiple users test out manually (feedback on bugs, or annoying UX)
- Test out upgrading existing testnet from last version, document or add tools for easier upgrade.
- If problems arrise here:
- Create bugfix issues
- Fix them
- Repeat QA
Once QA passes, we need to orchestrate the release.
- Merge to master
- Set all glide dependencies to proper master versions of repos
- Push code with new version tag
- Link CHANGELOG to the github release
- Package up new version as binaries (and upload to s3)
- Upgrade our public-facing testnets with the latest versions
- Release blog post