RelEng: PostMortem2.7

Problems with the 2.7 release process to address

• What things did we learn from the 2.7 release process?
• For the RMs to discuss to make a better unified release process going forward.

Development

• Add more Changelog categories
  • trivial for things that should only be rendered between pre-releases
  • what is a major_change vs minor_change vs trivial_change? Playbook-breaking is definitely major_change. Additions to the playbook keywords? Changes to how a playbook keyword acts?
  • Optimizations: bugfix or *_change?

Pre-branch

• I think we want to go back to having a tracker project pre-branch but remove it once we get to post-branch. The reason is that post-branch we can use the github query to tell what backport PRs exist against the stable-X.Y branch. But pre-branch, we just have to remember what things people have asked to be included.

Branches

• Should we use long pre-release version tags or short ones? "alpha vs a", "beta vs b". 2.4 and previous used alpha/beta. 2.5 and 2.6 use a and b. alpha and beta are easier for users to read. We may have to check that we're using packaging.versioning everywhere we need to compare versions in our releng scripts?