[Qgis-developer] Plans for the 1.7 Release

[Tim Sutton]

Hi All

I just wanted to recap a little for those who were not present at the
hackfest our plans for the roll out of 1.7. This release will be a
little more involved since we are going to simultaneously migrate to
GIT and Redmine. Here is a little synopsis of what is going to be
happening:

Branching 1.7

- Translation period will come to an end on friday evening (29 April)
after which we will create the release branch for 1.7 (actual
branching will happen sometime on the 30th).
- 1.7 will be the last public release of the 1.x series.
- If developer effort supports it we will make 1.7.x bug fix releases
in the interim until the 2.0 release
- 1.9.x releases will be made but not widely announced and will break
api compatibility and deprecate various features
- 1.9.x and possible maintenance of 1.7.x releases will be done from GIT

Svn -> Git Migration

- Migration will take place immediately after branching for 1.7
release but before call for packaging and release announcements
- We will revoke svn write access for all committers
- We will git svn clone qgis into a git repository
- We will prune out the various sub projects so that the QGIS git
repository represents only the QGIS code base itself and not code
examples and other things found under trunk.
- We will create additional repositories for each of the other
subdirectories in trunk.
- We will push the clones into github.org/qgis which will then become
the official repo
- We will reinstate commit access for svn committers but to the git
repo now instead.

Trac -> Redmine Migration

- Migration will take place immediately after branching for 1.7
release but before call for packaging and release announcements
- We will ask OSGEO for a backup of our current trac instance,
including uploaded resources etc.
- We will redeploy that backup on qgis.org
- We will install the trac git plugin
- We will migrate the svn commit references to git commit hash references
- We will run the trac -> redmine migration scripts to migrate the tickets
- We will ask osgeo to make the old trac instance read only and put a
redirector in place pointing to our redmine instance.

Release

- We will include in the release announcements a notice about the
GIT/Redmine migration, with pointers to required urls, documentation
etc.
- We will issue a call for packaging against the release branch in git
so that packaging related changes can be committed there directly

Rollback Option

Naturally making such a large change to our infrastructure involves
some risk. For this reason, existing svn and trac infrastructure will
not be removed for some time and will be simply made readonly at the
time of switch over. If we encounter any major issues during the
changeover process we will remove the readonly status of svn & trac,
evaluate the issues and come up with solutions, and then repeat the
process at a later date. Obviously this will be disruptive too and we
will make our best effort to avoid such actions being required.

Help & Discussion

The decision to do the migration has already been take at the
hackfest, but if anyone has implementation specific ideas or concerns
lets hear them. Also if you are a GIT ninja or a Redmine black belt,
and would like to make the migration happen smoothly, please let me
know as I will appreciate any helping hands.


Regards

Tim


-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
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