Bi-Weekly & Quarterly Release Process

Owned by Tim Beiko
Last updated: Oct 27, 2020 by Danno Ferrin
2 min read

During the August 4th Contributor Call, Besu's release process was discussed. 

Over the past few months, every Besu release has required a release candidate (see the original proposal). This change was implemented at a time where Besu releases had run into several showstopper bugs. 
Since then, things have stabilized. Since June, there hasn't been a bug found in a Besu RC requiring we scrub or re-do the release. 

In order to streamline the release process, on the last contributor call, we agreed to the following proposal:

Bi-Weekly Releases:  

  • No RC, release directly off master branch
  • Before the release is promoted by contributors' organizations, we recommend they:
    • Run it for 24 hours against the Ethereum mainnet network at the head of the chain, and;
    • Complete a fast sync from scratch against one of the major Ethereum testnets (i.e. Ropsten). 
  • If issues are found with the release during the release process (e.g. failing acceptance test), we:
    • Scrub the release, meaning we do not complete the process and make it available;
    • Re-use the same release number at the next bi-weekly release given it was never on a public release.
  • If issues are found with the release after the release process (e.g. issues processing blocks on mainnet once nodes are updated), we:
    • We recommend people not use it and stop promoting it;
    • We investigate the issue and potentially have an out-of-cycle release if maintainers judge the issue serious enough to do so;  
    • Have the next release (whether in-cycle or not) on an incremented version (e.g. if the scrubbed release is 1.1.1, the next one should still be 1.1.2) 

Quarterly Releases:  

  • We cut RCs off a separate branch.
    • We aim to have two RCs before a quarterly release to allow bug fixes from RC1 to be included in RC2. 
  • Before the release is promoted by contributors' organizations, we recommend they:
    • Run it for 48 hours against the Ethereum mainnet network at the head of the chain, and;
    • Complete a fast sync from scratch against the Ethereum mainnet.