Release practices
Updating release notes
We use towncrier to maintain the release history. This is where we keep users up to date with new features and breaking changes.
It makes the release manager’s job much easier if most release notes are written by the developers who make the corresponding changes, since they normally know best how to describe them. Therefore, where relevant, merge requests should include a “news fragment” with a brief user-focused description of the change. This is a requirement for backward-incompatible changes, and encouraged for features and bug-fixes. Refactoring, test-only changes, and other things that are not directly visible to users do not generally need news fragments.
File names
News fragments are stored in newsfragments/<section>/<issue>.<type>.rst
;
a link to the issue will automatically be included in the release notes.
For changes that do not have an associated issue, use
newsfragments/<section>/+mr<merge-request>.<type>.rst
; this requires
creating the merge request first in order to get its ID. (In fact, any
first segment starting with +
is fine, but the +mr<merge-request>
convention helps us to avoid collisions and makes tracking easier.)
News fragment sections
We have the following sections for news fragments, each of which corresponds to a section in the assembled release notes:
Server (
newsfragments/server/
): Backend code on the Debusine server, especially changes todebusine/db/
anddebusine/server/
. This includesServer
,Internal
, andWait
tasks.Web UI (
newsfragments/web/
): The Debusine web user interface, especially changes todebusine/web/
.Client (
newsfragments/client/
): Thedebusine
client, especially changes todebusine/client/
.Workflows (
newsfragments/workflows/
): Workflows, especially changes todebusine/server/workflows/
.Tasks (
newsfragments/tasks/
): Tasks, especially changes todebusine/tasks/
,debusine/server/tasks/
, anddebusine/signing/tasks
.Worker (
newsfragments/worker/
): The Debusine worker, especially changes todebusine/worker/
.Signing (
newsfragments/signing/
): The Debusine signing worker, especially changes todebusine/signing/
.General (
newsfragments/
): Anything that does not fit into the above categories, including significant codebase-wide changes.
News fragment types
We use the following types to categorize news fragments:
incompatible
: An incompatible change.feature
: A new feature.bugfix
: A bug fix.doc
: A documentation improvement.misc
: An issue has been closed, but it is not of interest to users. (This also includes issues about problems with other changes that were introduced since the last release; it doesn’t normally make sense to document these separately.)
Writing style
News fragments should be in the imperative mood (i.e. “Fix something”, not “Fixes something” or “Fixed something”).
They should be complete sentences, ending with a full stop.
They may use reStructuredText features, such as :ref:
for cross-references.
Each news fragment should generally be on a single line. towncrier
will
wrap them as necessary when assembling the release notes. If a single issue
needs more than one entry with the same section and type, then put each one
on a separate line.
If an issue is relevant to multiple sections or types, it may have multiple news fragments to cover them all.
Examples
If you made a breaking change to a workflow in response to issue #42, then
you would put a news fragment in
newsfragments/workflows/42.incompatible.rst
.
If you made an important bug fix to a server database model in merge request
!999 with no associated issue, then you would put a news fragment in
newsfragments/server/+mr999.bugfix.rst
.
If you added a new feature to the web UI in response to issue #123, then you
would put a news fragment in newsfragments/web/123.feature.rst
.
Making a release
The release manager follows this procedure to make a new Debusine release.
Select a branch
For simplicity, most releases are made from the devel
git branch.
However, it may occasionally make sense to release from other branches, such
as when Debian is in a freeze period and we need to make targeted fixes.
Following DEP-14, such
branches should be named <vendor>/<suite>
for development releases (e.g.
debian/unstable
) or <vendor>/<codename>
for stable releases (e.g.
debian/trixie
); they should be created by branching from an appropriate
tag.
The work needed to prepare a release will be merged into this branch, and the release tag will end up in that branch’s history.
Finalize release notes
Look through the changes since the last release (e.g. using tig
--first-parent <previous-tag>..
), checking for changes that should have
been documented but were not. Add news
fragments for these.
Run towncrier build --version <new-version>
to assemble a first draft of
the new release notes, then run make -C docs clean html
and check the
results in a web browser. Edit the result as needed to improve readability:
for example, it may make sense to consolidate items that relate to the same
overall topic, or to make minor formatting adjustments.
Add a debian/changelog
entry for the new release, briefly highlighting
the most significant changes.
File a merge request with all these changes, targeted to the branch selected above, and ask for review.
Release to Debian
Once your merge request with updated release notes has been approved, merge it into the appropriate branch. (Be careful to check for other changes that have been merged since you filed the merge request, since you may need to add release notes for them; it’s best to merge release notes branches as promptly as possible to avoid this extra work.)
In most cases, you can now run git debpush
(you will need the
git-debpush
package). This will push a signed tag causing the
tag2upload service to make an upload to Debian.
If the upload will require going through the NEW
queue (either due to a
new binary package, or because this is the first upload to the
-backports
suite for a new Debian release), you will instead need to
make an upload including binaries. To do this, run dgit sbuild
to build
the package, dgit push-built
to upload it, and push the resulting git
branch and tag.
git debpush
or dgit push-built
will create a signed
debian/<version>
tag. For convenience (such as making it easy to browse
changes interactively, or to make it a little easier for people to install
the Debusine client directly from git), we also create a <version>
tag
without the debian/
prefix. Do this manually using git tag
after
making the release to Debian, and push it.
If you did not make the release from devel
or from a backports branch,
then you should normally merge it into devel
now so that version numbers
of automatically-built packages from devel
remain higher than those in
Debian unstable.
Follow up
Over the next few days, check the tracker to make sure that your release
has built and passed tests everywhere and (if relevant) that it will migrate
to testing. If this is not the case, you may need to make follow-up
releases to fix any problems. It is a good idea to subscribe to the
debusine
package via the tracker so that you are notified of build
failures, testing migration, and bug reports.
For releases to unstable, once they have migrated to testing, we normally
also prepare a stable backport. These are maintained in the
debian/<codename>-backports
git branch, but they do not have independent
release notes, other than a brief “Rebuild for <codename>-backports” note in
debian/changelog
. To prepare these, use git merge
locally to merge
the release tag into the backports branch, run dch --bpo
or similar to
update the changelog, and upload the result using git debpush
or
dgit
as above.