new release manager

new release manager

[Sage Weil]

Hi everyone,

A key role that we've had a hard time staying on top of is that of release 
manager.  Getting releases tagged, built, and published has been done on a 
pretty ad hoc basis without much in the way of central coordination or a 
schedule or much else.  The dev checkpoint releases we used to do on a 
regular basis have mostly stopped entirely because we get busy with other 
things and either forget or don't have the time.

The situation improved dramatically when Loic organized a group of 
contributors to work on handling backports of bug fixes to stable releases 
and created and documented a repeatable and scalable process.  Even so, 
releases themselves have remained a pain point.

Abhishek Lekshman (of SUSE) has offered to take on a release manager role 
to coordinate our efforts.  Yay!  This will include

 - deciding when to do a stable release (a combination of regular cadence 
and expedited releases due to critical bugs)
 - working with the backports team to ensure backports land and are 
tested in time for a stable release
 - working with dev leads for their sign-off on releases
 - periodic dev checkpoint releases off of master
 - driving the mechanics of the release itself (the new build/release 
infrastructure that Alfredo and team have been working on)
 - release announcements (email + blog)

although I'm sure the role will evolve as we go.  :)

We've just ripped the last vestiges of autotools out of the master branch, 
so one of the first projects will be to kick the tires on the new build 
infrastructure with a dev release off of master that is 100% cmake.

Thanks, Abhishek!
sage