• StabWeeks

FreeBSD CURRENT stabilization weeks

Purpose

The goal of a stabilization week is to provide a single point in time where everyone participating in tracking CURRENT can update and share their update experience. Collective action helps with chasing regressions and bugs and saves time for all participants. For FreeBSD developers this is the right time to focus on stability and delay pushing in new features.

Implementation

Stabilization week happens in the last week of every month, where last week is the week that has the very last Friday of a month. At the beginning of the week you will see automated email from GlebSmirnoff to freebsd-current@ mailing list. Right after the email, the src committers are encouraged to avoid pushing risky changes to FreeBSD/main. There is no enforcement here, just common sense. Individuals and companies that participate in tracking CURRENT are advised to update the the revision specified in the email and start their testing. Your testing may vary - you can just update your laptop, make sure it runs all your daily applications, suspend & resumes and call it a success. Or you can run a very extensive testing suite for many hours. Either way participants are encouraged to report their experience as reply to the mentioned above email with copy to the mailing list. After some testing data is collected, the "stabweek admin" (ATM it is GlebSmirnoff) sums up whether we have regressions or not. From that point the scenario branches:

• No regressions: email is sent declaring stabweek as done and advisory freeze on FreeBSD/main is thawed.

• Few regressions, that can be addresses with a trivial git cherry-pick: the stabweek is declared is done but closing email will list known regressions and their respective fixing commits

• Several regressions that could be untrivial to fix with cherry-picks. Either a temporary branch is created, or the stabweek initial revision is shifted to a newer hash. Watch the email thread, it should always have the details.
• Worst case: we are not able to fix all regressions by the end of the Friday 18:00 GMT. The stabweek is declared as failed, the advisory freeze is thawed. This should never happen!

Stabilization week record

Archive

• Initial stabilization week proposal and following discussion at VendorBSD Conference 2023 (18 minutes)

• Initial stabilization week announcement on freebsd-current@

CategoryCURRENT