ironic/doc/source/contributor/releasing.rst

Releasing Ironic Projects

Since the responsibility for releases will move between people, we document that process here.

A full list of projects that ironic manages is available in the governance site.

Who is responsible for releases?

The current PTL is ultimately responsible for making sure code gets released. They may choose to delegate this responsibility to a liaison, which is documented in the cross-project liaison wiki.

Anyone may submit a release request per the process below, but the PTL or liaison must +1 the request for it to be processed.

Release process

Releases are managed by the OpenStack release team. The release process is documented in the Project Team Guide.

Things to do before releasing

• Review the unreleased release notes, if the project uses them. Make sure they follow our standards <faq_release_note>, are coherent, and have proper grammar. Combine release notes if necessary (for example, a release note for a feature and another release note to add to that feature may be combined).
• For ironic releases only, not ironic-inspector releases: if any new API microversions have been added since the last release, update the REST API version history (doc/source/contributor/webapi-version-history.rst) to indicate that they were part of the new release.
• To support rolling upgrades, add this new release version (and release name if it is a named release) into ironic/common/release_mappings.py:

  • in RELEASE_MAPPING make a copy of the master entry, and rename the first master entry to the new semver release version.

  • If this is a named release, add a RELEASE_MAPPING entry for the named release. Its value should be the same as that of the latest semver one (that you just added above).

    It is important to do this before a stable/<release> branch is made (or if the grenade switch is made to use the latest release from stable as the 'old' release). Otherwise, once it is made, CI (the grenade job that tests new-release -> master) will fail.

Things to do after releasing

When a release is done that results in a stable branch

When a release is done that results in a stable branch for the project, several changes need to be made.

The release automation will push a number of changes that need to be approved. This includes:

• In the new stable branch:
  • a change to point .gitreview at the branch
  • a change to update the upper constraints file used by tox
• In the master branch:

  • updating the release notes RST to include the new branch.

    The generated RST does not include the version range in the title, so we typically submit a follow-up patch to do that. We also manually mark the earliest-version directive on the new page, due to a reno bug <https://bugs.launchpad.net/reno/+bug/1746076> that may cause this to be incorrect for stable branches.

We need to submit patches for changes in the stable branch to:

• update the ironic devstack plugin to point at the branched tarball for IPA. An example of this patch is here.
• update links in the documentation (ironic/doc/source/) to point to the branched versions of any openstack projects' (that branch) documents. As of Pike release, the only outlier is diskimage-builder.
• set appropriate defaults for TEMPEST_BAREMETAL_MIN_MICROVERSION and TEMPEST_BAREMETAL_MAX_MICROVERSION in devstack/lib/ironic to make sure that unsupported API tempest tests are skipped on stable branches. E.g. patch 495319.

We need to submit patches for changes on master to:

• create an empty commit with a Sem-Ver tag to bump the generated minor version. See example and pbr documentation for details.
• to support rolling upgrades, since the release was a named release, we need to make these changes. Note that we need to wait until after the switch in grenade is made to test the latest release (N) with master (e.g. for stable/queens). Doing these changes sooner -- after the ironic release and before the switch when grenade is testing the prior release (N-1) with master, will cause the tests to fail. (You may want to ask/remind infra/qa team, as to when they will do this switch.)
  • In ironic/common/release_mappings.py, delete any entries from RELEASE_MAPPING associated with the oldest named release. Since we support upgrades between adjacent named releases, the master branch will only support upgrades from the most recent named release to master.
  • remove any DB migration scripts from ironic.cmd.dbsync.ONLINE_MIGRATIONS and remove the corresponding code from ironic. (These migration scripts are used to migrate from an old release to this latest release; they shouldn't be needed after that.)

As ironic-tempest-plugin is branchless, we need to submit a patch adding stable jobs to its master branch. Example for Queens.

For all releases

For all releases, whether or not it results in a stable branch:

• update the specs repo to mark any specs completed in the release as implemented.
• remove any -2s on patches that were blocked until after the release.