not announcing minor releases on the mailing list or twitter for now

[Mike Bayer]

Hi all -

Some of you may have noticed that several SQLAlchemy releases have
gone out in the past few weeks without my customary email on these
lists, nor without a tweet from the SQLAlchemy twitter account.

The reason for this is that I have created scripts that
comprehensively run through the many, many steps used to produce a
SQLAlchemy release, including building the documentation, changing
dates, writing the CHANGES file, applying all the tags and such, with
the goal being that for me to personally release SQLAlchemy is no
longer a life-changing event; I can instead release as needed, e.g.
every few weeks if needed or if urgent changes have been committed
even every few days, without it becoming a major time sink and more
importantly without my needing to be "on" mentally; I can do it
automatically and not worry too much about things going wrong if I'm
tired or not able to concentrate deeply.

Previously, the burden of releasing would cause me to wait longer, and
more critically the release would continually get pushed back as more
little bug reports and pull requests kept coming in and I would want
them all "on board" so that I wouldn't have to worry about releasing
again. This was a dysfunctional way of operating, and while we can
probably thank "slight dysfunction" as one of the reasons SQLAlchemy
even exists, making releases much easier is now allowing me to just
put out a release without waiting to be alert and while knowing I can
get to the next round of pending issues and release them just as
easily.

I am still adding a brief blog post to the site per release, and that
part is yet to be "automated", although I would like to make this part
of the automated process as well.

To that end, the production of the blog post would also perform a copy
operation out to the google groups mailing list, and also to the
SQLAlchemy twitter account. Automating these tasks is not something I
have the time to do right now, as just getting the bulk of the release
process was enough. All of SQLAlchemy's infrastructure has been
fully scripted at this point, including all web servers and CI servers
are built and maintained using Ansible scripts, and the release
scripts use bash scripting. Contributors who have an interest in
being part of SQLAlchemy's "infrastructure" project and who may wish
to help with automating mailing list and twitter posts can be added to
the group that has access to the source code for these tools.

thanks all for listening!

- mike


So for now, because I need to be able to push out a release quickly and without