Release 0.1.1 planning

[Kriti Godey]

I’ve reduced the list of issues in the next release to 4 issues: https://github.com/orgs/centerofci/projects/1/views/47. We should prioritize fixing these issues and make the release when done.

Volunteers needed

2 of the issues are assigned to Pavish and Dom. The other two are unassigned – any volunteers?

I also need a volunteer to do some manual smoke testing and make the Docker release.

Community PRs

We’ll also have a bunch of improvements from the work that community contributors have been doing. We should continue to get as many PRs reviewed and merged as possible so they make it into the release.

Next release

I created a milestone for release 0.1.2 and moved the remaining items from 0.1.1 in there, including all installation & deployment related items. I think we’ll be in a better place to prioritize those after we’ve decided what projects we’re working on next.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Kriti, regarding the package upgrades, none of the dependabot warnings are for a production build of the frontend codebase.

There is a check for vulnerabilities in our GH workflow (The npm audit step) and as long as that doesn't fail, we're good.

These warnings are irrelevant to our setup. They can only be exploited if someone already had access to a local machine running our development setup, and almost all of them are false positives. I remember an old blog post from Dan Abramov about this.

I would still like us to do an upgrade soon, but I don't think it's worth prioritizing at this moment, I think our time is best utilized fixing user facing issues for 0.1.1.

[Kriti Godey]

That's fine, that's a good enough resolution of the issue (the issue is for someone to review the alerts and see if action is needed). Please put  what you've said here in the issue and close as completed.

Feel free to make a separate issue to track upgrading packages eventually.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Thanks, I've added the comment and closed the issue.

> Feel free to make a separate issue to track upgrading packages eventually.

Regarding this, checking and performing upgrades is a continuous activity and GH issues don't seem as the right place to track them.

Perhaps we should have a 'Before working on a new release' process, where one of the activities is us checking if packages need upgrading and do it at the beginning of a new release cycle. For eg., we are starting work on 0.1.1 and we considered upgrading packages and decided not to.

[Dominykas Mostauskis]

Kriti, you mentioned 4 issues and 2 of them mine, but I'm seeing only 3 issues and 1 of them mine. I'll presume that you changed your mind about something and that this is not a mistake.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Dom,

There were 4 issues, and out of that 2 were assigned (1 to me and 1 to you).

Out of the unassigned issues, I closed 1 issue this morning, my time. So, there's 1 unassigned issue remaining.

[Dominykas Mostauskis]

Ok, thanks.

[Rajat Vijay]

I can help with the smoke testing and docker release - should not take long.

[Brent Moran]

I've assigned the UUID pkey issue
https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2635 to myself. I'll
work on that.

[Kriti Godey]

Okay thanks everyone! We'll cut the release as soon as the remaining three issues are resolved.

[Kriti Godey]

We got three more bugs filed yesterday that I've added to the 0.1.1 because they seem pretty bad. Two are related to casting and assigned to Brent, one related to installation assigned to Mukesh. Please let me know if you need to help or they turn out to be too complicated to fix quickly.

[Kriti Godey]

It looks like we have PRs or draft PRs for everything in 0.1.1. Can we get them merged by end of day tomorrow so we can cut the release on Thursday?

If anyone needs help with review or anything else, please ask!

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

We still have a couple PRs pending review/discussions on 0.1.1.

• Both the PRs mainly involve me and Sean and they have pending discussions around them. It'd take max Thursday EOD before we have them merged in, if not by EOD today.
• I plan to push the images with tag 0.1.1 by Thursday evening/Friday morning and smoke test upgrades and installation.
• We'll merge develop to master and cut the actual release on Monday and tag the images as latest (Friday is definitely not a good day for a release). 

The times mentioned above are in ET.

@Rajat Vijay Would you be able to help me with the smoke testing, since you volunteered for it? It'd be a great help!

Please let me know if anyone has concerns regarding this plan. Thanks!

[Kriti Godey]

Sounds good, thank you.

[Rajat Vijay]

Sure @Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal. Please send out an e-mail once they are ready to be tested. I will smoke test the product.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Team,

All required PRs for 0.1.1 have been merged, and I've cut the release branch: 0.1.1. I'll build the images today (It will be pushed to Dockerhub but not marked as latest).

The smoke testing is moved to Monday during IST hours. @Rajat Vijay I will send an email today (or during the weekend) with instructions.

If all goes well, we should be ready for the release by Monday morning Eastern time. 

@Sean Colsen suggested a buffer period between cutting the release branch and the actual release date, to help identify last minute regressions. I do think that's a good idea, and I'll come up with a process around it.

For 0.1.1, the last remaining PR was merged today, and the merge before that was 2 days ago. I think 2 additional days should suffice as a buffer, since the release is minor.  Since we've cut the branch today, I'm moving the release date to Tuesday morning Eastern Time.

Please let me know if any of you face major issues with `develop` which you think should be fixed before the release, or if you have thoughts/concerns regarding the plan. Thanks!

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Team,

The Docker images for 0.1.1 have been pushed to DockerHub (They have not been tagged as latest).

As discussed on Matrix, we will proceed with the release on Monday morning, Eastern Time. 

Here are the next steps:

Testing:

I have already tested installation of 0.1.1 and upgrades from 0.1.0. The steps to do this can be found on the GH issue.

@Rajat Vijay This is the plan for the smoke test:

• Install 0.1.1 using the instructions from here.
• Test creating a schema, importing a table, adding rows, deleting rows.
• Test creating a table from scratch with columns with content that use 16-bit unicode characters. Eg., 🥴, お名前

I don't think we need to test installation on all platforms for this release. If anyone objects, please let me know.

Making the release:

I'll write up the release notes and I'll need someone to review it. Since Kriti will be out on Monday, @Sean Colsen would you be willing to review it (as you have an inclination towards documentation and content in general)?

Once Rajat gives his approval, I'll raise the PR from 0.1.0 to master. 

@Mukesh Murali I'll be assigning you to approve the PR and merge it in, since you're the helper for the Release process. I could do it myself if you think this step isn't necessary.

After Mukesh merges it into master, I'll create a GH release 0.1.1 with the reviewed release notes.

I'll then tag the 0.1.1 images as latest and push them to DockerHub.

After the release:

I'll do a post-release installation test and an upgrade test.  @Mukesh Murali Would you be willing to help with this?

We'll merge master into develop.

I'll send a release mail to mathesar-developers mailing list. I don't know if this constitutes part of Marketing, but if someone else wants to do it, please let me know.

Let me know if the plan sounds good, or if any of you have concerns over this. Thanks!

[Sean Colsen]

Sure, I'll review the release notes.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Thanks Sean.

Minor correction in the previous mail:

Once Rajat gives his approval, I'll raise the PR from 0.1.0 to master. 

This line should be: Once Rajat gives his approval, I'll raise the PR from 0.1.1 to master.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

After making the release I'll need help (more like hand-holding) deploying the latest versions to the Demo site and our private servers (CCI and Joi's server).

@Brent Moran I assume you're the person who'd be best to help with this. I'll reach out to you regarding this after the release.

[Kriti Godey]

I'll be around Monday (I'm moving my time off to Wednesday-Friday) so I can review release notes.

[Rajat Vijay]

I have done smoke testing and also tested the items included in v0.1.1 release.

Reporting two issues:

1. https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2714

2. https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2715

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Thank you for the thorough tests Rajat!

I'm moving the release date to Wednesday morning (Eastern time).

I'd like https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2715 fixed for this release, since the fix should be small enough and it was reported by a user directly on GH. For the sake of time, I will pick it up now. I'll be making the hotfix directly on the 0.1.1 branch.

For https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2714, since Dom isn't available today, I'd like someone from the backend team to take a quick look at it (cc: @Brent Moran, @Mukesh Murali). If we don't have a PR for it today EOD Eastern time, I'll be inclined to place it in the next release. If you're raising a PR, please target the 0.1.1 release branch as the base. Please reply to this email if you're looking at the issue.

I'll be rebuilding the images tomorrow, before EOD Eastern time.

We'll have another smoke test Wednesday morning during IST hours. @Rajat Vijay Would you be willing to help with this as well?

We will not be moving the release any further than Wednesday morning. If we encounter issues during the next smoke test, unless they are critical regressions, they'll be part of the next release.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Team,

While fixing https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2715, I noticed a massive regression introduced by a community PR: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/pull/2213 which breaks the record page widgets entirely.

The issue is tracked here: https://github.com/centerofci/mathesar/issues/2717

We cannot release 0.1.1 with this regression. I'll be prioritizing fixing this now.

I'd like us to re-review the community PR which introduced this bug. @Sean Colsen Please go through it again with a fine comb and also test all the affected features. I'll fix the issue in the meantime. Please prioritize this.

We would probably have to reschedule the launch. I'll update the launch date once the issue is fixed.

[Kriti Godey]

Thanks for catching these, Pavish and Rajat. Good work!

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Team,

We have reverted the PR which caused the regressions in 0.1.1. There is one small PR, pending discussion which should be merged/closed tomorrow.

The process will remain the same as we followed before, it is tracked in this issue. The ETA for release is Thursday morning Eastern Time.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Team,

I have pushed the 0.1.1 images to DockerHub (not tagged as latest).

Testing

• @Rajat Vijay Please perform the smoke test Thursday morning IST time. Installation instructions are here. The plan for the smoke test is to go through Susan's workflow from the library management demo video.
• Rajat and I will also deploy the version to library.mathesar.org and test the following during IST hours. This was suggested by @Brent Moran via private Matrix chat.
• > making sure that static file serving is all working manually with both http://242.234.234.244 (ip address from outside of server) is working and also with https://www.anactualdomain.com
• > This is because we changed the way that works a bit in the back end. I don't think it should affect anything, but that's the only change that we made that's not possible to really test with our suite.

Release

• Once we have Rajat's approval, we'll make the actual release during Eastern time, in the morning.

The progress can be tracked in the release issue.

@Mukesh Murali I'll need your help deploying the new version to the demo server and CCI internal server. We'll also have to deploy it to Joi's server, but I think it can wait till Kriti's back.

[Rajat Vijay]

@Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal I have performed smoke testing on my end and did not find any critical issue.

[Rajat Vijay]

@Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal https://library.mathesar.org is up and running now. I have DM'ed you the password for it.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

Thank you so much @Rajat Vijay

We're all set for the release.

I'll be merging 0.1.1 to master now and tag the 0.1.1 DockerHub images as latest.

[Pavish Kumar Ramani Gopal]

We're released 0.1.1 🎉

The release notes are here.

Thank you everyone for your help and work on 0.1.1!

@Rajat Vijay Thank you for the massive help with testing!

@Mukesh Murali Please proceed with installing the latest version in the demo server and the CCI internal server when you're available. Let me know once that's done, I'll send an email out to the mailing list. I would like the demo servers to be updated before sending the mail.

PS: Team, please keep an eye out for anyone reporting issues with the release.

[Kriti Godey]

Nice work!