Release engineering

To forge a successful stable release of the Haiku operating system, several important tasks must be accomplished. These steps are time tested as a best roadmap to draft a successful release of Haiku.

Important first steps

  • Review blockers for the next release in Trac

  • Active members of the contributors group should reach concensus on the need for a stable release

    • We try to have a release every year, but blocker tickets can prevent this from happening

    • It’s difficult to commit to strictly time-based releases because the available time of unpaid developers is unpredictable

  • Community nomination of a Release Coordinator

    • Should be someone from the contributors group

    • Should have visibility of most aspects of Haiku

    • Should have good coordination and communication skills

    • Generally occurs via the haiku-development mailing list

    • Timeline proposals are proposed via the haiku-development mailing list

General Rules

  • Don’t rush the release. Better delay it a bit and take the time to make sure everything is ok.

  • Make sure the final image is really well tested.

  • Start planning early. Getting the release ready takes time. Waiting until a new release is urgent is a bad idea.

  • There will be another release. Maybe some big changes are too risky to integrate now, and should wait until the next release.

Forming a timeline

An important aspect of drafting a release is forming a timeline. The Release Coordinator’s role is to drive Haiku towards this release date.

  • Final date for enhancements in (RELEASE)

  • Branch buildtools for (RELEASE)

  • Branch haiku for (RELEASE)

  • Setup CI/CD pipelines for (RELEASE)

  • Generate first test candidates (TC0, TC1, etc), encourage extreme testing.

  • Begin accepting bugfixes in branches via code review

  • Final translations synchronization

  • Generate first release candidates (RC0, RC1, etc), encourage testing.

  • Profit

  • R1/Beta 2’s timeline from branch to release was roughly 35 days

  • R1/Beta 3’s timeline from branch to release was roughly 50 days.

Release dates can slide, it’s ok. We just try to slide pragmatically (+1 week because of X,Y,Z)