Early Seed Release

Summary

How we handle Dendron's early seed releases

Details

These are pre-release versions of Dendron extensions made available to Environmentalist (Private).

Release cadence: Every Other Tuesday (PST)

Steps

Code

Before the release

when:
From Release
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- verification of early seed should be done by 6AM UTC Friday

Notify 5 @DendronTeam in the thread created the day before to remind the team that the release branch has been snapped and all changes merged to master after that point of time should not be added to this week's Ready to Ship unless they need to be cherry-picked into this week's release.
Make sure the weekly journal (weekly.journal.*) for next week is created so that team members can easily add items that didn't make the release cut-off point.
Go to Create Release Image (Private) github actions and view the latest pipeline run. The early seed image should be built off a branch prefixed with early-seed/*. See Pipelines for General Release (Private) for more info.
Check that features in Ready to Ship are accurate.
- copy the commit id of what was pushed in the latest pipeline run, see here for screenshot
- look at commit history of dendronhq to match last merge changes
- make sure this is accurate with the latest contents of Ready to Ship
  - if not, create a new Weekly Journal (Team)
  - to create a journal, follow same instructions as individual weekly journal but do it for the team weekly journal
  - copy over any of next week items to this journal
  - Everything going in the early seed should be entered under the  sections of each category
Install the .vsix file locally and do a sanity check in test-workspace
- make sure early seed features from Ready to Ship don't have any obvious bugs
- See here for how to install .vsix manually
- If a bug is detected, ping @DendronTeam and relevant parties to get it fixed
If everything works, add to the release note thread of the week with the url of the vsix

Docs

Day before

The evening before, create a new Discord thread in #dendron-team with the title early-seed yyyy-mm-dd
- Template: Discord Thread Start
- This is done to give the teams a heads up to get docs in, remaining updates to the Ready to Ship section, etc. ahead of time

Day of

Make sure Early Seed Changelog (Private) is updated by following the process here. This should be submitted as a PR to dendron-site.

Example: Loom recording showing example update to early seed changelog, up to the submission of a PR

When the PR is approved, merge into dev

Merge dev into master in dendron-site

git checkout dev
git pull
git checkout master
git pull
git merge dev
git push

Check that the changes have made it to the main page
Use the Discord Announce template to write the announcement message
- You can see an example of a past announcement here
- see the sop on release highlights 4 for release format
Announce the release in the environmentalist (Private) channel.

Checklist

Code Checklist

test early seed build
if any issues detected, check in changes into the release/* branch directly

Docs Checklist

Day Before
- Notice given to team
  - Discord Thread Start
Day of
- Update Early Seed Changelog (Private) is updated via PR
- Early Seed Changelog PR approved, merged to dev, and dev is merged to master
- Verify website is updated with latest content
- Announcement made to Environmentalists
  - Discord Announce
  - Announce in the #environmentalist channel