Hi,
earlier this month, the Release Managers team had a 4-days sprint
focused on streamlining our release process. This need was identified
about a year ago, when we learned we had to switch to a 4-weeks
release cycle.
anonym is currently (and bravely) using the — mostly untested so far —
output of our work for 4.13. Fingers crossed! We'll see how much we've
improved things in practice, and from there we'll be able to identify
what the next biggest problems are.
Here's what we did during that sprint.
We started by going through the entire release process doc, trying to
keep our minds open, and looking for issues such as:
- Do we really need to do this? Is the benefit worth it?
- Do we really need to do this _during the release process_?
- Could we automate this?
- Does this cause unreasonable stress?
- How do we follow this doc in practice? e.g. undocumented tricks
that every RM is using for convenience's sake,
but in a slightly different manner
Then we fixed most of the issues we had identified:
- Streamlined RM configuration and environment management (!245)
- Streamlined UDF signing to avoid typing a passphrase dozens of time
(and the stress that goes with mistyping)
- Triaged our manual test suite, dropped lots of tests with
unreasonably high cost/benefit ratio
- Automated Tor Browser WebRTC tests (#10264)
- Updated plans to automate remaining manual tests
https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/10250
- Moved long shell snippets to scripts, so that commands can always
be copied'n'pasted as-is and work the same regardless of what
interactive shell, and shell configuration, the RM is using (!234).
- Automated custom APT repo operations so the release process
can directly call the relevant scripts, instead of the RM having to
constantly go back'n'forth between the release process doc and
the custom APT repo doc (!236)
- Moved to build-time the check for installing custom VeraCrypt package
- Moved to GitLab CI the check for APT snapshots expiration date
- Automated:
- removing UDFs for never released versions (!239)
- generating email to manual testers (!237)
- Cleaned up cruft in our custom APT repo, wrote tooling to automate it,
and set up a process to do this regularly
Finally, we filed issues for remaining problems that we know how to
fix, but that are currently blocked by other work:
- Regularly import updated PO files from Transifex
https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/18002
- Regularly merge master branch into stable → devel
https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/18003
Cheers!
