[dtp-pmc] Clarification about versioning/tagging policy heading into the

[brian.fitzpatrick@xxxxxxxxxx]

Hi all... 

This morning at the weekly PMC meeting, we discussed the issue that Xiaoying
brought up about tagging of files during the testing/rampdown time, which
has some possible pitfalls if we don't watch ourselves a bit. 

The current plan entails branching on July 25 (Shanghai time) for 1.6.1
M1. This allows us to build and test the M1 milestone build while not preventing
us from continuing development towards the M2 milestone in August. On August
7, the rampdown/test period ends and we will continue doing development
in the Head stream until such time as we need to branch to start work on
the next major release for June 2009. 

To avoid some difficulties during the rampdown/test period for M1, we are
asking all DTP committers to do the following: 

1) During the period between the branch (July 25) and the M1 release (August
7), any changes made for the M1 milestone branch must also be made in the
Head. (If a change is required for M1 but not M2, the committer must be
pretty clear about the goals of the fix before delivering any changes.)

2) Any changes made to both streams will be tagged as follows:
2a) The changes made to the M1 branch should be tagged with the Shanghai
time date stamp as we've been doing. 
2b) The changes made to the Head branch should be tagged with the Shanghai
time/date stamp + 5 minutes. This ensures that the changes made in the
M2/Head branch are seen as "later" by the update manager to avoid
downloading the wrong plug-ins. 

For example - if you deliver to org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity and
tag your changes as v200807221431 in the M1 branch, when you deliver the
same changes to the M2/head branch, you would change the tag slightly to
v200807221431 + 5 minutes, which gets you v200807221436. 

Please note the versions in the Bugzilla entry when you mark a bug as fixed
-- this will make sure that we know which tags went where.

These two easy steps will hopefully ensure that we don't have incorrect
versions of plug-ins grabbed via the update manager. 

A quick reminder... There's also the Plug-in Versioning Policy for DTP
(you can read it here: http://wiki.eclipse.org/DTP_Plug-in_Versioning_Policy).
Since the maintenance releases primarily deal with bug fixes, if you make
changes to a plug-in to fix bugs, you can update the third number in the
version, but it can only be updated once per release. If you take a look
at the CVS history for the manifest.mf file, you should get an indication
as to whether the plug-in version was updated or not and react accordingly
(i.e. if it was already changed, don't change it again; if it wasn't changed,
go ahead and update the third number in the version). 

And as a final note... All deliveries made during the
1.6.1 M1 rampdown policy should adhere to the PMC approval process. All
bugs must approved by PMC. Project leads should petition the dtp-pmc
mailing list for approval and any community member should do the same for
bugs that they feel should be addressed in DTP 1.6.1 M1. 

Thanks in advance. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to drop us
an e-mail or message on the newsgroup or mailing lists.

--Fitz 

Brian Fitzpatrick
Eclipse Data Tools Platform PMC Chair
Eclipse Data Tools Platform Connectivity Team Lead
Staff Software Engineer, Sybase, Inc.

Brian Fitzpatrick
Eclipse Data Tools Platform PMC Chair
Eclipse Data Tools Platform Connectivity Team Lead
Staff Software Engineer, Sybase, Inc.