[Development] Focusing bug fixes to 5.9 branch and patch releases during H1/17

[Lars Knoll]

Hi,

sorry for answering only now to this thread, I was on vacation last week. 

Let’s conclude this topic now by moving on towards 5.9 as Tuukka proposed. After some thinking I also agree that this is the best course of action from where we are right now.

This is certainly not a great solution, ideally we should have the capability of making both 5.9 in time and push out 5.8 and 5.6 patch level releases. This is currently not working and I’ll be following up on this. My goal is to make sure we identify all the issues in our current release infrastructure, fix at least the worst things that make creating patch level releases difficult until 5.9, and have a clear roadmap for the remaining items. I really don’t want this to happen again.

The other thing I’ll take from this is to have another look at the interaction between TQtC and the Qt project. I do see a conflict here in how we handle the release planning between the Company and the Project, and we’ll need to find a better (or more clearly defined and agreed) way on how we jointly create the release roadmap.

Cheers,
Lars

> On 20 Feb 2017, at 13:56, Tuukka Turunen <tuukka.turunen at qt.io> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 18/02/2017, 21.40, "Development on behalf of Thiago Macieira" <development-bounces+tuukka.turunen=qt.io at qt-project.org on behalf of thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:
>> 
>>   On sábado, 18 de fevereiro de 2017 12:11:53 PST Mat Sutcliffe wrote:
>>> On 18 February 2017 at 19:13, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
>>> My point was that this decision happened already on 29 November. That was
>>> the original planned release date for 5.8.0, and also the day on which the
>>> 5.9.0 initial schedule was set. Could it have been predicted at that time
>>> what the consequences might be for 5.8.1?
>> 
>>   Hindsight is 20/20. Let's not rehash coulda-woulda-shoulda.
>> 
>>   The question is only what to do now.
> 
> What I hope we can do is to have everyone helping to get Qt 5.9.0 out as soon as possible and then make also 5.9.1 soon (although I think we do need to make 5.6.3 in between).
> 
> If we can have the extra help proposed by KDAB and others in the community for making Qt 5.8.1 release geared towards making Qt 5.9 we will be able to make it faster and with higher quality than otherwise possible. 
> 
> One concrete item is manual testing of our various snapshots. The sooner these are fully tested, the better. We have CI and RTA test automation, but these do not cover every aspect. Manual testing is needed as well. Often it is a case that a bug is found in quite late release steps, but has actually been there for some time already. Another way to help is making good bug reports that are also notified to the release team. The better the description of the issue, the easier it is to fix it. Third item is of course fixing things quickly – by having more people fixing the issues identified we will be able to close them sooner and thus proceed faster. 
> 
> For the CI stability most important thing is to reduce the amount of flaky test cases, which cause failures in CI runs. This in turn both adds delay as well as increases the load of the CI. 
> 
> Yours,
> 
> 		Tuukka
> 
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