[erlang-patches] Information Release dates and patching summary

[Henrik Nord]

Hello Erlang-patches!

This is a summary email that will be sent out to the erlang-patches list 
from time to time. In this email you will find information regarding 
code-stops, release dates, and useful links to ease your patching.

I will also take this opportunity to describe our way of working and 
testing.

RELEASE DATES

Below you can find the planned release dates, and code stop dates for 17.0.
Note: We will not accept any NEW feature patches for inclusion in 
Erlang/OTP 17.0 after 2014-02-21.

Preliminary dates for the upcoming release:
Release:         erts, emu,comp  |Code stop           |Documentation 
stop        |Release Date
17.0-rc2         2014-02-21         2014-02-21         2014-02-21       
                2014-02-26
17.0                2014-03-10         2014-03-17 2014-03-19         
               2014-03-26

We will focus the time between 17.0-rc2 and 17.0 on bug fixes, 
improvements, and testing. Therefore you are most welcome to submit 
patches regarding such issues and we will try our best to include them 
before 17.0 is released.
Especially bugs introduced in 17.0-rcX.

PATCHES:

Make sure to look at our Github wiki page before submitting a patch to 
Erlang/OTP
https://github.com/erlang/otp/wiki

We also have a page on Erlang.org concerning the status of submitted patches
http://www.erlang.org/development/

There you can find information about patches that are "awaiting_action", 
Waiting for the topic author to correct one thing or another.
Assigned to a team within Erlang/OTP, to be reviewed and approved/dropped.
Or scroll through the list of graduated patches since R16B.

We currently have ~25 patches that are "awaiting_action".
There is a total of 27 patches that are assigned to a developer or a 
team, awaiting their review. And we have 5 patches that are approved but 
still needs to pass our nightly builds and tests.

After a request from the Industrial Erlang User Group, we started using 
Github pull requests for accepting patches into Erlang/OTP. This has 
resulted in over 200 pull requests sent in less than 8 months of 
accepting pull requests.
We are looking into ways of improving this especially in regards to 
information preservation.


BEFORE SUBMITTING A PATCH:

To facilitate a faster review process please make sure that your commit 
message conforms to the rules at the github wiki page.
https://github.com/erlang/otp/wiki/Writing-good-commit-messages
Make sure that your code compiles.
Make sure that all tests for the changed application pass.

If applicable you will be asked to add tests and documentation for your 
patch.

TESTING:

We currently test on ~60 different setups, including but not limited to 
Bsd, linux, solaris, darwin and windows. This includes different 
hardware as well as software. This sums up to about ~850 000 test cases 
each night. We also run dialyzer and cover.

Unfortunately the test coverage is not 100% in all tools and 
applications. Some tools and applications have bad or missing tests. 
This is something we aim to improve and you are all invited to help by 
submitting patches in these areas.

When we are aiming for a new major release, as we currently are, all 
platforms tests the master branch. When we are releasing a minor 
version, we have a reasonable split amongst the test platforms so that 
we still run tests for the master branch and new features.

All builds consists of a mix of internal development branches, and open 
source contributions. This limits the amount of open source branches we 
are willing to test at the same time. We do not wish them to interfere 
with our branches or other open source branches.
This might be another reason as to why your branch is not tested for a 
few days.


Useful links
https://github.com/erlang/otp/wiki
http://www.erlang.org/development/
https://github.com/erlang/otp/wiki/Writing-good-commit-messages

-- 
/Henrik Nord Erlang/OTP

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