Since 2012, the Ubuntu flavor does not produce alpha milestones for its images. The community flavors that choose to release alpha milestones (and the beta-1 milestone) are responsible for finding the resources to make these milestones happen. In general, releases will not happen without volunteers.
As a guideline (not a rule), images will be made available for testing as early as first thing UTC Tuesday (depending on the time zone of who's responsible for taking care of the actual image building) and the release image available as late as UTC Thursday (again, need to coordinate).
If you look at the release task signup for the current release, you find three columns. These roles are described below.
Image (Nusakan) Engineering
These tasks need to be performed by someone with shell access to the image building machine or someone on the Ubuntu release team.
- Final publishing
- Setting up the ISO tracker
Handling blocks & unblocks
Checklist Tracking
- Flavour release teams are responsible for ensuring their images get rebuilds when required if a global rebuild is not occurring.
- Find out what flavours are participating in the milestone through emailing the ubuntu-release mailing list. Possible flavors are:
- Kubuntu
- Lubuntu
- Ubuntu Budgie
- Ubuntu GNOME
- Ubuntu Kylin
- Ubuntu MATE
- Ubuntu Studio
- Xubuntu
- Collect any release note URLs from flavours that want to provide them
- Make sure all flavours have their images marked as ready before release day
- Prepare and send release announcement to ubuntu-devel-announce with a cc to ubuntu-release
- Be responsive on IRC
QA contact
Ideally this is someone from the team related to the particular flavour that is responsible for watching the ISO tracker and bugs and figuring out what affects which image and communicates priorities to the release team. Chances are, you're already doing this, so as a general rule this should always be "flavour contacts" (i.e. the flavour's release team).