Schedule and Mechanics for releasing Miramar

[Mark Banner]

The drivers have been discussing the various mechanisms around releasing Miramar. We're going to need to treat Miramar like the old-style releases because we've effectively missed getting on the central/aurora/beta/release train for Gecko 5 - if we try to do that now, L10n would get about a week after string freeze before localisations would have to be complete, which obviously isn't acceptable.

The good news is that we believe we can get Miramar released on the same schedule as Gecko 5, and get the next version of Thunderbird up and running on the release train for Gecko 6.

As I've already mentioned, we're going to treat Miramar in an old-style way of releases. So we'll be creating new clones, releases/comm-miramar, releases/mozilla-miramar and releases/l10n-miramar (I was thinking of using -5.0 as the shared part of the name, but decided that would get confusing as the real source of that is the release train repos).

Now to break down what is happening by dates, note that this doesn't cover Thunderbird.next from Gecko 6.0 - I'll be doing a separate note covering that.

First, here's a quick diagram to explain what's happening, notes on the various periods are below.

• Until May 10th:
• comm-central and mozilla-aurora will be the main locations for Miramar checkins
• During this period, build & release will work on getting comm-miramar and mozilla-miramar up and running.
• We may also transition builders to this set up, if we can get automated pulls and pushes from comm-central to comm-miramar (should be easily doable).
  
• May 10th: String & Feature Freeze
• At this point comm-miramar will formally branch from comm-central
• comm-central and mozilla-central will become the new nightly builds
• comm-miramar, mozilla-miramar and l10n-aurora will be the Miramar repos at this stage
• mozilla-miramar will be synced with whatever comes into mozilla-aurora
  
• May 17th:
• This is the merge of aurora to beta channel for Firefox
• Here we change mozilla-miramar so that it is synced with mozilla-beta
• The l10n repositories are changed to l10n-miramar, and those repositories get filled with the data from the l10n-aurora repositories at the Firefox aurora -> beta channel merge point
• May 17th - 7th:
• At this point we'll be releasing Miramar onto the beta channel, and may do multiple releases as appropriate
  
• June 7th:
• Initial Deadline for L10n changes
• June 21st - 28th (exact date TBD):
• Release Miramar

Mark