Dev Chat Summary: December 6th (4.9.2 week 1)

This post summarizes the dev chat meeting from December 6th (agenda, Slack archive).

4.9.2 ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. + timing

• 41 tickets already marked for 4.9.2, minus fixed-major there are 39 tickets
  
• #42586 is the only high priority ticket in the milestone
• Aiming for 4.9.2 release toward the end of January 2018

Plan for 4.9.x minor releases

• Will look to do 6-8 weeks for a release window with 4-6 weeks of work, week and a half of betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process., half week of RCrelease candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta).
• From past experience, its best to have someone who isn’t the major releasemajor release A release, identified by the first two numbers (3.6), which is the focus of a full release cycle and feature development. WordPress uses decimaling count for major release versions, so 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, and 3.1 are sequential and comparable in scope. lead handle a minor releaseMinor Release A set of releases or versions having the same minor version number may be collectively referred to as .x , for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, 5.2.3, and all other versions in the 5.2 (five dot two) branch of that software. Minor Releases often make improvements to existing features and functionality. as it (1) gets the major release leads some rest and (2) gets more folks familiar with the release process
  
• @kadamwhite @joemcgill @desrosj interested in helping as a minor release lead, but unavailable in January. @obenland available to lead a minor release, @sergey available as a backup lead.
• If you have interest in being a minor release lead, please pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” @jbpaul17 or mention in #core. Self-nominations are accepted and encouraged, you don't have to be an engineer, and commit access is not required but helpful.
• We need to make sure we have people with WP.org access available for the builds, but anyone with the knowledge can organize/follow up on tickets in the lead up to a release and be a decision maker.
• No rush to find someone with WP.org access to package a release until the week leading up to a release
• Would be good to add a “next-minor” milestone to TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. so we could pull things into the 4.9.x milestone once they are actually resolved instead of mass punting

Definition of "minor" release

• Bugfixes and minor enhancements/features that do not add new deployedDeploy Launching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors. files and are at the discretion of the release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release. with suggestions/input from component maintainers.
  

Weekly updates from leads

• Focus leads to provide weekly updates including:
  • what big things happened this week?
  • what needs eyes/testing?
  • what big challenges could the team use help with?
  • what decisions need feedback before being made?
    
• Component leads to provide updates as necessary, though not required weekly, and focused mainly on big things or areas where we need coordination

#4-9-2, #dev-chat, #summary