Helios/Simultaneous Release Plan

This document is for developers of the June 2010 Helios Simultaneous Release. [Need link for users and consumers]

Requirements For Participation

Projects that are part of Helios agree to abide by the requirements of the Eclipse yearly Simultaneous Release.

Compliance Reports show progress on meeting the requirements and their final achievement.

Milestones and Release Candidates

The Release is always on the fourth Wednesday of June. The milestone dates are at roughly 6 week intervals. Any end-of-cycle release-candidate (RC) dates are typically one week apart. Each project has their deliveries due at times offset from the end-date, so that the project dependencies can come together in a reasonable order. These delivery times are based on the dependencies between projects. They are labeled +0, +1, +2, and +3, with +0 coming first (the Platform) and +3 coming last (EPP). Projects themselves decide if they are +0, +1, +2, or +3. The actual time-offset represented by these intervals change over the course of the year of development, being several days at first, but then only one day near the end of the release. The following calendar is the official schedule of the overall Helios Release. Projects are free to have their own schedules as long as they meet the Helios deliverables.

Note that projects choose their own +n category based on major or primary dependencies. There are many cases where a project might have to deliver pieces of their code a little earlier, if some project depends on it, or a little later if they have a stray dependency. These sorts of deviations are left to the projects to work out, pair-wise, among themselves. Feel free to bring up complicated cases for discussion.

Given all these constraints, the exact dates for any particular year are pretty predictable. The following table summarizes the most significant Helios dates, but see the subsequent calendar for the important details. That is, your stuff is due earlier than these table dates! Projects need to deliver a week or two before these "end dates", depending on their chosen, committed offset category (+0, +1, etc).

Note added 6/2/2010: see message to cross project list for clarification of exact final week process ... and remember to clarify Indigo's plan similarly.

M1  Friday, August 21, 2009
M2  Friday, October 2
M3  Friday, November 13
M4  Friday, December 18
M5  Friday, February 5, 2010
M6  Friday, March 19
EclipseCon! March 22
M7  Friday, May 7
RC1 Friday, May 21
RC2 Friday, May 28
RC3 Friday, June 4
RC4 Friday, June 11
Release Wednesday, June 23

The calendar is available in the following formats: ICal,ATOM News Feed,HTML

Communication Channels

Cross-Project Milestone & RC Status Reporting

Only negative status needs to be reported. It is essential for many aspect of the simultaneous release that communication be prompt and clear, on many topics. One of the most important ones, is if someone is not meeting some date or delivery. Put another way, we assume everyone is on target and has delivered their stuff unless a note is sent to cross-project list that you are delayed. Its better to be up front about it, so everyone knows what to expect, rather than to hope things turn out ok at the very last minute, since if you "miss" without saying anything you are more likely to impact other people, and miss your chance to be part of the release.

Mailing Lists and Newsgroups

Eclipse projects have three communication channels: a mailing list for developers, a newsgroup for users, and Bugzilla. While Helios is not a "project" per se, it will use the same structure:

Developer mailing list

• cross-projects-issues-dev - mailing list for developers and releng (see archives). This is the list to use to discuss build issues, announce changes in plans, slippage in deliverables, etc.

Users news group

• eclipse.simultaneous-release - newsgroup for users (see archives)

Bugzilla

If there is any doubt about where a bug belongs, it can always start in the "Cross-Project" component. (Under Eclipse Foundation > Community). If it turns out to be a single-project's responsibility, it can be moved to that project. If it is a true cross-project bug, where several projects need to act, then it can stay in the cross-project component.

• Search in Eclipse Foundation > Community > Cross-Project
• Open a new Cross-Project bug

The Planning Council Mailing List

Because there has been confusion in the past, we'll be explicit here that the planning council mailing list (eclipse.org-planning-council) is for Planning Council business, not the Helios Release activities per se. While they sometimes overlap, there is no need to cross post. While anyone can request a subscription to the planning council list (for openness and transparency) the expectation is that only Planning Council members post to it.

Conference Calls

The Planning Council has regularly scheduled calls for Planning Council business. See conference calls.

But there are no planned calls for the release, per se, or for larger audiences, but they can be arranged if required or desired (for example, if needed for build coordination).

Helios Builds and P2 repository

Builds (Aggregation)

This section, about assembling the repositories, is subject to change, as improvements in the process are made.

A number of utilities have been written to automate the assembly of Callisto '06, Europa '07, Ganymede '08, Galileo '09, and now Helios '10 builds. These are available in their own CVS repository. You can find more information about the history and organization by looking at some of the old, previous information on the Galileo Build, Ganymede Build or Europa Build pages).

With Helios we are using the Buckminster Galileo/Helios Builder (with some discussion of incorporating the Buckminster Aggregator).

The Contributing to Helios Build page is where you go to learn how to add your project to the Helios build.

p2 Repository

To obtain the latest published bits from Helios, use this URL:

http://download.eclipse.org/releases/helios

It contains the latest milestone, release candidate, eventually the release itself, and then eventually service releases.

To obtain the latest working version, as we build up to a milestone or release, you can test the site at

http://download.eclipse.org/releases/staging

Service Releases

Coordinated Service Releases are (always) scheduled for the fourth Friday of September, and the fourth Friday of February. Individual Projects may have their own, of course, at any time, if they need to, but all participants in the Yearly Release, are expected to participate in the Coordinated Service Releases. What bugs are fixed, if any, is up to each Project to decide, but each Project must continue to "fit in", build, install, avoid conflicts, etc.

[Note: the following Service Release dates have not yet been added to the above calender, but will be soon.]

SR1

GA: 9/24/2010 (last Friday of September)

In the SR1 rampdown, as shown in the following table, there will be 4 RCs, each spanning one week, with projects staging themselves into the build just one day apart.

Projects may elect not to participate in a particular RC, but have an obligation to fix any build problems that are related to their code or p2 repository.

RC1 will be in the middle of August, several weeks earlier than previous years, just to make sure we can still build, etc. Subsequent RCs dates are similar to previous years, except a "quiet" final week is also planned. (It is normally pretty quiet anyway ... this just formalizes it).

The Final week before GA will not have any further builds or contributions, but instead be reserved for final adopter testing and preparation and only emergency fixes for very serious regressions will be considered.

The 'promote' day (9/23) will be the day projects put final zips in their final spot (without displaying them) so they can propagate through the mirroring system. Similar for the p2 repository -- it will be replaced on 9/23 with the new content so it can start mirroring. Note: there is no plan to retain multiple versions in the common discovery repository (unless someone volunteers to do what's required to make that happen). At noon on 9/24 projects can make their final maintenance releases visible.

	+0 Mon.	+1 Tues.	+2 Wed.	+3 Thur.	EPP Fri.
RC1	8/9	8/10	8/11	8/12	8/13
RC2	8/30	8/31	9/1	9/2	9/3
RC3	9/6	9/7	9/8	9/9	9/10
RC4	9/13	9/14	9/15	9/16	9/17
Helios SR1 ("GA")				promote: 9/23	GA: 9/24

SR2

2/25/2011 (last Friday of February)

Rampdown similar to SR1.

	+0 Mon.	+1 Tues.	+2 Wed.	+3 Thur.	EPP Fri.
RC1	1/17	1/18	1/19	1/20	1/21
RC2	1/31	2/1	2/2	2/3	2/4
RC3	2/7	2/8	2/9	2/10	2/11
RC4	2/14	2/15	2/16	2/17	2/18
Helios SR2 ("GA")				promote: 2/24	GA: 2/25

Participating Projects

There is a separate page for projects that plan to participate in the Simultaneous Release.