Birch Release Deprecated

With the Open edX Cypress Release, the Birch release is no longer supported. This page remains as a record of when new features were included in Open edX at the time of the Birch release.

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.

Number	Reason	Status
#6441	upgrading Pillow for security reasons	present in RC1
#6805	updating footer copyright notice for legal reasons	present in RC1
#6869	UI bugfix for footer copyright notice	present in RC2
#6841	compatibility fix so that we can run the Birch RC tests on Jenkins	present in RC2
#6936	bugfix related to importing courses and split modulestore	present in RC2
#6951	Fix grades download in courses with cohorted content	present in RC2
#6930	improve performance	present in RC2
#6873	bugfix related to textbooks	present in RC2
#6747	bugfix in Javascript for some check/show answer buttons on problems	present in RC2
#6773	bugfixes for Recommender XBlock	present in RC2
#6833	bugfix related to split modulestore	present in RC2
#6878	bugfix for documenting upgrade requirements of payment flow	present in RC2
#6818	bugfix for ecommerce redemption codes	present in RC2
#6958	bugfix for Studio unicode error	present in RC2
#6740	better warnings around incompatibilities around content libraries	present in RC2
#6984	unicode fix	present in RC3
#6892	memory/performance fix	present in RC3
#7002	documentation updates	present in final release
#7021	bugfix for handling auto-reconnect mongo exceptions	present in final release

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.

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