The Morning After

[Jesse Keating]

On Monday 20 March 2006 23:56, Patrick Barnes wrote:
> We had to update a lot of information on both fedora.redhat.com and
> fedoraproject.org.  We have some unnecessary duplication, and there are
> places where we can get things working a little more smoothly.  Jesse, and
> anyone else working on these things, what did you notice?  How can we
> improve the process?

The download instructions are nearly identical on the wiki and the static 
site.  I had to update these twice and since they aren't in the same markup 
it was a lengthy by hand process.  Selecting and pasting sha1sums all over 
the place.  Why couldn't we have just included or referenced the gpg signed 
SHA1SUM files for each iso dir in the wiki?

Website changes should have been made the week before the release and then 
just tagged live the morning of.  I completely forgot about doing the website 
changes until the night before and morning of.  Keeping a running list of 
what pages need touching for a release would be a HUGE help.  This way we can 
divide and conquer.

Making updates to the wiki during the release is HARD.  Bandwidth was at a 
premium and it made waiting for changes to process very very long.  Is there 
a way to do changes but not make it live until the release day?  Or should 
these changes just be made the night before the release?

Maintaining the mirror list was painful as well.  We weren't able to release 
to mirrors until Friday morning, which meant that through the weekend I got 
reports of mirrors that were ready and I had to keep updating the mirror list 
files that yum (and now our redirector on download.fedoraproject.org) used.  
I've got a couple volunteers from the community to take this over, but it is 
still a painful operation mostly done by hand.  I would really like some cool 
community person to think of a better way to manage these files.  Perhaps 
feed a base URL into the script and it will add the appropriate content to 
various files?   We also need to vette the current mirror list(s?) found on 
fedora.redhat.com and/or the wiki.  Not all mirror admins reported that they 
are ready, so we should check w/ the ones we have currently listed and make 
sure that we're listing mirrors that are keeping up to date.

And just in general, coming up with a checklist of things that need to be done 
prior to a release.  I have my list from an internal prospective, lock the 
tree, spin a test, fix bugs, spin, fix bugs, spin, get an RC, test like hell, 
get export approval, release to mirrors.  But externally there is a lot of 
documentation and such that needs to be done and I'd like to see a running 
checklist.  That's about all I got.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (geek.j2solutions.net)
Fedora Legacy Team      (www.fedoralegacy.org)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/attachments/20060321/448ad252/attachment.sig>