Developer Area/Release Instructions/Release Candidate

To do a release candidate, follow the usual release instructions up to and including step 5.

Changelog and release notes

Do not paste the full changelog on Launchpad (that's for the actual release) and only put something like "First release candidate for 1.4" in the bullet point section of the release notes on Launchpad.

Do not update the bug tracker

The bug tracker does not need to be updated because no bugs should ever have an RC release as its milestone.

Furthermore, these bugs are not fixed until the release has happened, so they should be left as "Fix committed".

Announcements

The main purpose of an RC is to get people to test the release for any major bugs. Therefore, we do not consider the RC as a release and only announce it through:

• Identica/Twitter
• IRC
• The news forum

(Note that Freshmeat is missing.)

Here is a sample announcement for the News forum:

 This is a call for testing. If you want to make sure that Mahara 1.4 works well on your site, please help us out by testing this first release candidate:
 
   https://launchpad.net/mahara/+milestone/1.4rc1
 
 The Mahara developers have completed development and bug fixing on Mahara 1.4 and are giving users an opportunity to report last minute bugs to be fixed before the final release:
 
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+filebug
 
 If important bugs are found within the next week we may produce a second release candidate. Otherwise this release candidate will become the final release.
 
 - The 1.4 Release Managers

Do not update the demo site

The demo site should always be the last stable release. The RC is not a release yet.