[Discussion] Are we ready for a release?

[g123k]

Hi everyone,

Tomorrow, a documentary will be broadcasted on the French TV and OFF will be mentioned.

In the stable app, there's an annoying bug with Nutritional facts being inaccessible the first time we click on it (fixed by #4902).
How confident are we to release an app with the current dev branch?
(cc @teolemon @monsieurtanuki @M123-dev)

⚠️ If so, please stop approving any PR meanwhile ⚠️

Here is the changelog:

Features

• 4068 - autocomplete for brands (#4871) (2554848)
• 4836 - clickable link to "open new issue" when relevant (#4875) (542c4c2)
• 4947 - added "download language" to product table (#4951) (e0b3111)
• Support for '-' in nutritional values (#4909) (2e22987)
• Use the Slivers mechanism with the Gallery view (#4913) (f81ba98)

Bug Fixes

• 4228 - max lines 2 and tooltip for edit image buttons (#4939) (46271ca)
• 4627 - no more nutrients wiped out (#4902) (e5757e7)
• 4663 - use the latest password for background tasks + refactoring (#4869) (28262ca)
• 4697 - no more redundant "complete category" button (#4937) (bcf9356)
• 4820 - ChangeNotifierProvider already disposes (#4933) (56eba91)
• 4900 - backup_scheme.xml type fix (#4901) (3020a4d)
• 4923 - added a padding for banner (#4927) (b6f97cd)
• 4925 - consistency for "edit product" app bars (#4931) (c76715d)
• 4940 - also try the URL in the /dist/ subfolder for SVG (#4942) (de9e6f2)
• changing the language of countries when changing the Food App language. (#4920) (ecaba8e)
• Don't rely on removeDiacritics to highlight text (#4636) (e904b05)
• labeler v5 compat (#4906) (02a9942)
• properly refresh food preferences language (#4956) (64481bb)

[monsieurtanuki]

I'm rather confident in what I coded (3 features, 9 fixes), and the rest looks ok too.

I would single out 4947 - added "download language" to product table (#4951) (e0b3111) which impacts never used methods about a deprecated hive table. Last time completely removing the related code caused app crashes in some cases. In this case, and @M123-dev was careful too when reviewing, I tested with an app upgrade and a new app from scratch, and it worked OK in both cases.

That said, even if we were 100% sure about the code I cannot see how we could create a new version that would be downloadable tonight.
I would prefer us to be rather stupid and systematic, and just upload a new version every month - let alone emergency versions. And have it tested one week as alpha/beta.
Like:

• day 1 of month: start of the frozen zone - no more PR mergers
• day 2: create a new version and upload it to the stores
• up to day 9: have our alpha/beta testers ... erm... test the app
• day 10: if no new bugs, send it to production and end of the frozen zone
• that means from day 1 to day 10 no more PR mergers except for new bug fixes

We should beware of the kiss of death. That said, france 5 is not "Plus belle la vie".

[M123-dev]

Completely agree with @monsieurtanuki , besides that:

• We should test _Exception: Exception: Failed to load SVG: https://static.openfoodfacts.org/images/attributes/ecoscore-c.svg 404 #4940

• A ProductModel was used after being disposed. #4820 maybe, has the potential for breaking a whole page, but should be save.

[monsieurtanuki]

I'm optimistic about both #4940 and #4820.
But that's precisely what we should do during the frozen zone/test phase: focus on fishy PRs - and on all PRs anyway, specifically testing them.

[teolemon]

@monsieurtanuki @g123k I'm going to perform an internal release with the latest commit, in case we're not up to date. Ok with you ?

[g123k]

Thanks for your all feedbacks and I totally agree with you @monsieurtanuki about recurring releases.
My question was just if we could have a quick fix for the annoying Nutritional facts error.
The answer is NO, so no release tomorrow.

[monsieurtanuki]

@teolemon ok for a new release.
@g123k our release process cannot go faster than the time taken by release processes by stores. If stores react fast, so can we.