Release Checklist for BIND 9.11.22, BIND 9.11.22-S1, BIND 9.16.6, BIND 9.17.4

Release Schedule

Code Freeze: Wednesday, August 5th, 2020

Tagging Deadline: Monday, August 10th, 2020

Public Release: Thursday, August 20th, 2020

Release Checklist

Before the Code Freeze

• (QA) Inform Support and Marketing of impending release (and give estimated release dates).
• (QA) Ensure there are no permanent test failures on any platform.
• (QA) Check Perflab to ensure there has been no unexplained drop in performance for the versions being released.
• (QA) Check whether all issues assigned to the release milestone are resolved¹.
• (QA) Ensure that there are no outstanding merge requests in the private repository¹ (Subscription Edition only).
• (QA) Ensure all merge requests marked for backporting have been indeed backported.

Before the Tagging Deadline

• (QA) Look for outstanding documentation issues (e.g. CHANGES mistakes) and address them if any are found.
• (QA) Ensure release notes are correct, ask Support and Marketing to check them as well.
• (Support) Check release notes, ask QA to correct any mistakes found.
• (Marketing) Check release notes, ask QA to correct any mistakes found.
• (SwEng) Update API files for libraries with new version information.
• (SwEng) Change software version and library versions in configure.ac (new major release only).
• (SwEng) Rebuild configure using Autoconf on docs.isc.org.
• (SwEng) Update CHANGES.
• (SwEng) Update CHANGES.SE (Subscription Edition only).
• (SwEng) Update README.md.
• (SwEng) Update version.
• (SwEng) Build documentation on docs.isc.org.
• (QA) Check that all the above steps were performed correctly.
• (QA) Check that the formatting is correct for text, PDF, and HTML versions of release notes.
• (SwEng) Tag the releases². (Tags may only be pushed to the public repository for releases which are not security releases.)
• (SwEng) If this is the first tag for a release (e.g. beta), create a release branch named release_v9_X_Y to allow development to continue on the maintenance branch whilst release engineering continues.

Before the ASN Deadline (for ASN Releases) or the Public Release Date (for Regular Releases)

• (QA) Verify GitLab CI results for the tags created and prepare a QA report for the releases to be published.
• (QA) Request signatures for the tarballs, providing their location and checksums.
• (Signers) Validate tarball checksums, sign tarballs, and upload signatures.
• (QA) Verify tarball signatures and check tarball checksums again.
• (Support) Pre-publish ASN and/or Subscription Edition tarballs so that packages can be built.
• (QA) Build and test ASN and/or Subscription Edition packages.
• (QA) Notify Support that the releases have been prepared.
• (Support) Send out ASNs (if applicable).

On the Day of Public Release

• (Support) Wait for clearance from Security Officer to proceed with the public release (if applicable).
• (Support) Place tarballs in public location on FTP site.
• (Support) Publish links to downloads on ISC website.
• (Support) Write release email to bind-announce.
• (Support) Write email to bind-users (if a major release).
• (Support) Update tickets in case of waiting support customers.
• (QA) Build and test any outstanding private packages.
• (QA) Build public packages (*.deb, RPMs).
• (QA) Inform Marketing of the release.
• (QA) Update the internal BIND release dates wiki page when public announcement has been made.
• (Marketing) Post short note to Twitter.
• (Marketing) Update Wikipedia entry for BIND.
• (Marketing) Write blog article (if a major release).
• (QA) Ensure all new tags are annotated and signed.
• (SwEng) Merge the automatically prepared prep 9.X.Y commit which updates version and documentation on the release branch into the relevant maintenance branch (v9_X).
• (SwEng) Push tags for the published releases to the public repository.
• (QA) For each maintained branch, update the BIND_BASELINE_VERSION variable for the abi-check job in .gitlab-ci.yml to the latest published BIND version tag for a given branch.
• (QA) Prepare empty release notes for the next set of releases.
• (QA) Sanitize all confidential issues assigned to the release milestone and make them public.
• (QA) Update QA tools used in GitLab CI (e.g. Flake8, PyLint) by modifying the relevant Dockerfile.

1. If not, use the time remaining until the tagging deadline to ensure all outstanding issues are either resolved or moved to a different milestone. ↩ ↩²

2. Preferred command line: git tag -u <DEVELOPER_KEYID> -a -s -m "BIND 9.X.Y[alphatag]" v9_X_Y[alphatag], where [alphatag] is an optional string such as b1, rc1, etc. ↩