Coming Soon: Birch release candidate

[David Baumgold]

Hey everyone, we released Aspen, the first named release of the edX software, at the end of October 2014. Now, we’re getting ready to announce a release candidate for Birch, the second named release. Exact dates are still being determined, but here’s what you need to know.

Candidates for named releases start off as one of the edX weekly releases to edx.org, since those get the most testing. The current plan is for this week’s release to edx.org to become the release candidate for Birch. EdX is currently in the process of testing our weekly release candidate, but the massive snowstorm in the northeast United States may delay our weekly release schedule. Once the weekly release goes out, we’ll be monitoring our servers carefully, and if any major issues surface on production, we’ll do a patch release. Once everything has been stable on production for at least 24 hours, we’ll declare that commit to be the Birch release candidate.

That’s where you, our amazing community, come in. By the time we have our Birch release candidate, we will already know that it works well for edx.org, but we won’t know much about how well it works for everyone else running Open edX. We’ll need you to test the release candidate on your own testing systems and staging servers, to help uncover and fix any bugs that didn’t show up in our testing. We’ll provide Vagrant boxes for devstack and fullstack to make it easier for you to test, just as we did for Aspen. We’ll give the community at least two weeks to test before declaring Birch officially released, but it could take longer, depending on how many issues we find and how long they take to fix.

So what’s new in Birch? Plenty! Our documentation team is putting together some release notes for Birch, but if you can’t wait for that, you can check out all the release notes from each of our weekly releases, which are posted online at ReadTheDocs.

I’ll send out another email when the Birch release candidate is ready to go. If you have other questions or comments, please let me know!

David Baumgold

Developer Advocate, edX

[D Lewis]

Excellent heads-up David.

Looking forward to the new release.

Keep up the good work.

D Lewis

[David Baumgold]

Update: as expected, the release schedule to edx.org was delayed due to the storm. In addition, the recently discovered GHOST vulnerability required a patch release to edx.org, which went to production late last night. We want to let the code sit on production for at least 24 hours without incident before cutting the Birch release candidate, but since that will be Friday evening, and the edX team will be done with work for the day, we will instead plan to cut the release candidate on Monday. This also gives us the benefit of testing on edx.org over the weekend: if there are problems on production over the weekend, the release candidate could be delayed further, but that is very unlikely.

Also, to clarify: the release candidate will include the fix for the GHOST vulnerability. If any other security vulnerabilities are discovered in the edX codebases, they should be reported privately to secu...@edx.org. They should not be posted in any public forum until a fix is available in the edX codebase for the vulnerability.

David Baumgold

[David Baumgold]

However, our doc team has put together some release notes for the upcoming Birch release, and the features it will contain. Take a look! https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DOC/New+Features+in+Birch

[D Lewis]

Excellent, David. Outstanding work you are doing. Keep up the great job! Derrick

[David Baumgold]

OK everyone, we have a Birch release candidate! The RC consists of the "openedx/rc/birch" branch on our various platform-related repositories:

• edx-platform
• configuration
• cs_comments_service
• notifier
• edx-certificates
• xqueue
• edx-documentation
• edx-ora2
• XBlock
  

I've updated the Named Releases page on our Confluence wiki with this branch name, as well. We do not yet have Vagrant boxes for this release candidate, since they take some time to build, test, and package. We hope to have those available by tomorrow.

As a reminder, here are the preliminary release notes for Birch: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/DOC/New+Features+in+Birch The documentation team at edX is also working on writing up some more comprehensive release notes for when Birch is actually released.

We are also still working on a migration script to help get you from Aspen to Birch. We've been testing it against the master branch of the edx-platform repository, since we didn't have an actual release candidate to test against until now.

Please start testing this release candidate as much as you are able to, so that we can squash as many bugs as possible before Birch is officially released! We are going to continue working to give you the tools that you need to test more effectively (Vagrant boxes, migration script, etc), and please give us feedback about what else you need. The more feedback you can provide, the better the end result. Thanks for all your help!

David Baumgold

On Tuesday, January 27, 2015 at 3:08:05 PM UTC-5, David Baumgold wrote:

[David Baumgold]

Building Vagrant boxes has proven to be more challenging than we hoped, but we have a Vagrant box for devstack available for the Birch release candidate, and the Vagrant box for fullstack should be available tomorrow.

After a fair amount of discussion, we're also changing the naming scheme that we've been using for git branches and tags related to named releases. The Birch RC branch is now "named-release/birch/rc" -- the "openedx/rc/birch" branch still exists, but it should not be used as it will not be updated. Birch RC1 has been tagged as "named-release/birch.rc1". In addition, the canonical git tag for the Aspen release is now "named-release/aspen", but the "aspen.1" tag is still there for backwards compatibility.

To bring up a Birch RC1 devstack, just set the OPENEDX_RELEASE variable to "named-release/birch.rc1" before running `vagrant up`, as is documented here: https://github.com/edx/configuration/wiki/Named-Releases