urbit/MAINTAINERS.md

Maintainers' Guide

Hotfixes

Here lies an informal guide for making hotfix releases and deploying them to the network.

Take this PR, as an example. This constituted a great hotfix. It's a single commit, targeting a problem that existed on the network at the time. Here's it should be released and deployed OTA.

If the thing is acceptable to merge, merge it to master

Unless it's very trivial, it should probably have a single "credible looking" review from somebody else on it.

You should avoid merging the PR in GitHub directly. Instead, use the sh/merge-with-custom-msg script -- it will produce a merge commit with message along the lines of:

Merge branch FOO (#PR_NUM)

* FOO:
  bar: ...
  baz: ...

Signed-off-by: SIGNER <signer@example.com>

We do this as it's nice to have the commit log information in the merge commit, which GitHub's "Merge PR" button doesn't do (at least by default). sh/merge-with-custom-msg performs some useful last-minute urbit-specific checks, as well.

You might want to alias sh/merge-with-custom-msg locally, to make it easier to use. My .git/config contains the following, for example:

[alias]
        mu = !sh/merge-with-custom-msg

so that I can type e.g. git mu origin/foo 1337.

Prepare a release commit

You should create Landscape or alternative pill builds, if or as appropriate (i.e., if anything in Landscape changed -- don't trust any compiled JS/CSS that's included in the commit), and commit these in a release commit.

You should always create a solid pill, in particular, as it's convenient for tooling to be able to boot directly from a given release.

If you're making a Vere release, just play it safe and update all the pills.

Tag the resulting commit

What you should do here depends on the type of release being made.

First, for Urbit OS releases:

If it's a very trivial hotfix that you know isn't going to break anything, tag it as urbit-os-vx.y.z. Here 'x' refers to the product version (e.g. OS1, OS2..), 'y' to the continuity era in that version, and 'z' to an OTA patch counter. So for a hotfix version, you'll just want to increment 'z'.

Use an annotated tag, i.e.

git tag -a urbit-os-vx.y.z

The tag format should look something like this:

urbit-os-vx.y.z

This release will be pushed to the network as an over-the-air update.

Release notes:

  [..]

Contributions:

  [..]

You can get the "contributions" section by the shortlog between the last release and this release:

git log --pretty=short LAST_RELEASE.. | git shortlog

I originally tried to curate this list somewhat, but now just paste it verbatim. If it's too noisy, yell at your colleagues to improve their commit messages.

Try to include a high-level summary of the changes in the "release notes" section. You should be able to do this by simply looking at the git log and skimming the commit descriptions (or perhaps copying some of them in verbatim). If the commit descriptions are too poor to easily do this, then again, yell at your fellow contributors to make them better in the future.

If it's not a trivial hotfix, you should probably make any number of release candidate tags (e.g. urbit-os-vx.y.z.rc1, urbit-os-vx.y.z.rc2, ..), test them, and after you confirm one of them is good, tag the release as urbit-os-vx.y.z.

For Vere releases:

Tag the release as urbit-vx.y.z. The tag format should look something like this:

urbit-vx.y.z

Note that this Vere release will by default boot fresh ships using an Urbit OS
va.b.c pill.

Release binaries:

(linux64)
https://bootstrap.urbit.org/urbit-vx.y.z-linux64.tgz

(macOS)
https://bootstrap.urbit.org/urbit-vx.y.z-darwin.tgz

Release notes:

  [..]

Contributions:

  [..]

The same schpeel re: release candidates applies here.

Note that the release notes indicate which version of Urbit OS the Vere release will use by default when booting fresh ships. Do not include implicit Urbit OS changes in Vere releases; this used to be done, historically, but shouldn't be any longer. If there are Urbit OS and Vere changes to be released, make two separate releases.

Deploy the update

(Note: the following steps are automated by some other Tlon-internal tooling. Just ask ~nidsut-tomdun for details.)

For Urbit OS updates, this means copying the files into ~zod's %base desk. The changes will be synced to /~zod/kids and then propagated through other galaxies and stars to the rest of the network.

For consistency, I create a release tarball and then rsync the files in.

$ wget https://github.com/urbit/urbit/archive/urbit-os-vx.y.z.tar.gz
$ tar xzf urbit-os-vx.y.z.tar.gz
$ herb zod -p hood -d "+hood/mount /=base="
$ rsync -zr --delete urbit-urbit-os-vx.y.z/pkg/arvo/ zod/base
$ herb zod -p hood -d "+hood/commit %base"

For Vere updates, this means simply shutting down each desired ship, installing the new binary, and restarting the pier with it.

Announce the update

Post an announcement to urbit-dev. The tag annotation, basically, is fine here -- I usually add the %base hash (for Urbit OS releases) and the release binary URLs (for Vere releases). Check the urbit-dev archives for examples of these announcements.