The current target date for Birch's official release is Tues, Feb 24. If a significant number of changes are added to the release candidate branch, a new release candidate will be created and the release date will be pushed back, to give people time to test the new release candidate.

The Birch release candidate is the named-release/birch/rc branch in our git repositories, and it is based off the hotfix-2015-01-29 tag in edx-platform. Since that commit, the following pull requests have also been added (or will be added) to the release candidate.

Time Spent

This is just an approximation, based on looking back after the fact.

• Writing preliminary documents (audience doc, improvements doc, etc): about a day
• Preliminary meetings, cross-team communication, determining when was the right time to cut the first release candidate: about a day
• Releasing RC1: about three days
  • Discussing tagging scheme and tagging repos
  • Emailing the edx-code mailing list to let people know what was happening
  • Debugging issues with the configuration repo (installation progress hanging at syncdb)
  • Understanding what Ansible was doing – mostly without support from devops
  • Building Vagrant images for both devstack and fullstack, transferring them to Google Drive and Amazon S3
  • Testing, making pull requests to configuration, etc
• Migration script: about three days
  • Understanding what Ansible was doing – with some support from devops
  • Unexpected surprises: automatic database upgrades
  • Writing the script, with multiple iterations and feedback on each one
  • Testing the script, which required building a new Aspen VM each time
• Releasing RC2: about a day and a half
  • Half a day to identify all the bugfixes that needed to go in, and merging them
  • A day to build new Vagrant images, get them uploaded, email edx-code, etc
• Releasing RC3: about a day
  • Build new Vagrant images, get them uploaded, email edx-code, etc
• Releasing Birch final: about two days
  • Built two sets of Vagrant images, one set that had the "named-release/birch/rc1" tag, one set that didn't – one day for each set of images
  • Debugging the "named-release/birch/rc1" tag issue with Steven Burch from Stanford
  • Further testing
  • Write blog post, email edx-code
• Documentation review (throughout): about half a day
  • Clarifying technical points for the documentation team
  • Making pull requests to the edx-documentation repo, checking them on readthedocs.org

Total: roughly 14 business days of work, which translates to about 3 weeks of effort.