[Python-Dev] The release process

Sat Mar 1 20:07:49 CET 2008

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I just announced the 2.6a1 and 3.0a3 releases, and am thawing both 
branches.
Just some quick feedback in case anybody is interested. First, huge 
thanks go to Brett Cannon, Neal Norwitz, Mark Dickinson and Fred Drake 
for their help last night. Apologies also to them for my drunken rants 
on jabber :). Also thanks to Martin von Loewis for the Windows msi's 
for Python 2.6. I'm sure Martin will soon provide msi's for 3.0, but 
these are not yet available.
Some other random notes:
Brett fixed test_profile in 3.0 last night but test_cProfile was still 
broken. I disabled the test via a TestSkipped and set this to 
expected in regrtest.py. This test should be fixed and the expected 
skip removed.
I will definitely need help keeping the various NEWS files up to 
date. I don't see any way that I'll be able to spend time on these 
when I'm cutting a release. Python 2.6 NEWS was simply impossible to 
proofread because of its sheer size and the fact that it was the first 
alpha of the series.
PEP 101 describes 4 news files: Misc/NEWS and Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for 
both 2.6 and 3.0. I am urgently requesting that when people commit 
newsworthy items to the Python releases that they keep the NEWS files 
up-to-date. This is especially tricky for code merged between the two 
versions. Thanks to Neal for looking over 3.0's NEWS file last 
night. As RM, I am going to operate on the assumption that the NEWS 
files are up-to-date. I'd be thrilled if someone volunteered to be 
the "NEWS czar" -- we all know when the next alpha release is coming 
(Friday March 25), so this czar would be responsible for watching 
commits and making sure that NEWS was updated as appropriate, or 
harassing the committer into updating NEWS to describe their new 
feature. If you'd like to be this NEWS czar, please let me know.
With apologies to Anthony, welease is crack. I made pretty good 
progress once I ditched it and starting doing things manually. 
Between now and the next alpha I intend to work on a command line 
script to help with releases. If you're interested in helping, let me 
know.
PEP 101 is sorely out of date, especially with regards to updating web 
content and the Python documentation. I think I now know how to 
update the python.org web site, but the new Python documentation 
format is still a mystery to me. If someone would like to help update 
PEP 101 for the documentation steps, please let me know.
PEP 101 also describes some steps for updating the distutils version 
numbers. These instructions seemed stale too. If you know anything 
about distutils version numbers and the process for updating them, 
please contact me.
There's no Misc/RPM/python-3.0.spec file so I skipped that step too. 
Sean, do you know anything about that?
That's it. See you again next time :). Let me know if you notice 
anything broken about the releases.
- -Barry
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