Release Model Working Group Chat Summary: February 19th, 2020

This is the Summary of the Release Model Working Group Chat in #core on Slack at 20:00 UTC!

Folks are welcome to check out the agenda and Slack archive for this week’s meeting. Here is a recap of the last meeting, as well.

Thank you to @mikeschroder for doing the peer review on this summary!

This week a kan ban project board was introduced with new GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issues created!

@noisysocks broke down some of the ‘development’ phase of the pre-release cycle into individual issues for each critical step. 

A few of the issues have been assigned to contributors and more volunteers are welcome! Workflow is being broken down amongst team members as follows:

  • @marybaum is covering the kick off release video and alpha phase announcement steps, and mentioned that the alpha kick off announcement would happen weeks to months earlier than the video. @desrosj pointed out that the last release video was for 5.0 Bebo.
  • @marybaum may also put together an alpha-beta launch brief.
  • @noisysocks is taking the lead on examining the process of compiling dev notes. @audrasjb volunteered to help, and folks mentioned that the dev notesdev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. for 5.4 are being put together right now. @desrosj brought up that @jorbin, @jeffpaul, and @desrosj have facilitated the field guideField guide The field guide is a type of blogpost published on Make/Core during the release candidate phase of the WordPress release cycle. The field guide generally lists all the dev notes published during the beta cycle. This guide is linked in the about page of the corresponding version of WordPress, in the release post and in the HelpHub version page. for recent releases and can assist with this item, too.
  • @francina is working on collecting information from component maintainers.
  • @clorith is researching each team’s role in a release.
  • @hristo-sg and @amykamala are evaluating the process of testing involved in a release with the goal of identifying areas that could be further automated or streamlined.

@noisysocks mentioned that some conversations have already lead to ideas for recommendations!

Next Meeting

Meetings for the Working Group will take place on the first and third Wednesday of the month at Wednesday March 4, 2020 at 08:00 UTC and Wednesday March 4, 2020 at 20:00 UTC. Hope to see you there!

#meeting-notes, #release-process