Workflow for a Point Release - Webmaster Team
This page describe the current workflow and best practices for the preparation of the website for a point release.
Note: For stable releases, more things need to be done; please refer to the web team release checklist.
This task must be run by people in the webmaster group that have the required permissions to: stop and edit cron jobs, build the website and push to mirrors.
1. A member of the release team often writes a draft of the announcement and a member of the publicity team should have committed it in the news page (with a link to it in the homepage). Check that both changes are online already (front page shows links to the news, and the article with its translations appears when linking to it). If not, or if publicity members ask webmasters to publish it, run a partial rebuild of the website. We'll do it in two steps:
1.1. Rebuild the News folder (or News/202x folder, if you are in a hurry):
ssh -tt www-master.debian.org sudo -u debwww /srv/www.debian.org/update-part News
1.2. Now update the homepage (and RSS), and push to mirrors again:
ssh -tt www-master.debian.org sudo -u debwww NOSUBDIRS=1 /srv/www.debian.org/update-part index
Note: the publicity team workflow for releases and point releases - the web preparation must start after the announcement is published in the website. Coordinate in #debian-publicity or #debian-release or #debian-www
2. For stable/oldstable point releases, almost the whole website needs to be rebuilt but the push to mirrors cannot be made until the installation images are ready (keep an eye on #debian-cd and #debian-release). We will update the website manually, without pushing to mirrors.
2.1. To avoid presenting an updated info in some places while the CD images are not ready yet, or while other parts of the website still didn't get updated, we would need to stop the cron jobs that build the website automatically, and thus update and build ourselves, and push to mirrors, as it is needed.
Open an ssh session in www-master.debian.org
ssh www-master.debian.org
Check that the cron jobs that build the website are stopped (Publicity delegates may have stopped them):
sudo -u debwww crontab -e
- and mark as comment the lines related to the website builds the ones that launch /srv/www.debian.org/cron/often and /srv/www.debian.org/cron/lessoften (if they are not commented out yet).
2.2. We need to stop any job of website build that is running to avoid automatic push to mirrors. You can see the processes by typing (in www-master):
sudo -u debwww pstree -p debwww
If there is any job running, you can decide to wait for it to finish (if there is enough time to postpone the website preparation) or stop it with
sudo -u debwww kill PID
2.3. Now return to your local environment, to your clone of the webwml repo. The files english/releases/codename/errata.wml and english/template/debian/release_info.wml need to be updated with the version number of the point release. In some cases, we also need to update english/releases/codename/index.wml and english/releases/codename/release.data (see below for the details).
In english/releases/codename/errata.wml add a line to point to the URL of the announcement for the point release if it's not done yet.
In the english/template/debian/release_info.wml file there are several tags that need to be updated:
current_release_codename
current_release_date_codename
current_release_newsurl_codename
- current-cd-release
You can commit and push the changes to the repo, but any push to mirrors of the built files should wait until the the CD images are ready (that's why we stopped the cron jobs and the running jobs in www-master).
In the case of stable releases or final point release for an oldstable release, english/releases/codename/index.wml needs to be updated too, and the tags <define-tag current_release> and <define-tag current_release_date> to match the new stable name.
In the case of oldstable releases, or the first publication of a stable release (i.e., a release becoming oldstable), english/releases/codename_oldstable/release.data needs to be updated too, adding or updating these tags:
<define-tag jessie-images-url>https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/8.11.0</define-tag> <define-tag jessie-cd-release-filename>8.11.0</define-tag>
- In the case of stable and oldstable point release, you have to update the tags and wml files corresponding to both releases.
Commit the changes (in your local copy, no in www-master.debian.org)
2.4. In www-master.debian.org, build the relevant parts of the website, using the script:
sudo -u debwww NOMIRROR=1 /srv/www.debian.org/update-part CD
(Repeat the command changing CD for each one of the folders that use the release_info tags. At least: CD, distrib, releases). This step usually takes more than 10 minutes. Each folder takes some minutes to update.
2.5. Build the homepage and files in the main folder (that includes the "download" page) with:
sudo -u debwww NOSUBDIRS=1 NOMIRROR=1 /srv/www.debian.org/update-part index
This step should take some minutes, not much.
2.6. If the images are not ready yet, you can build the other folders of the website with the same command of step 3.3. Don't build the "security" folder because that one takes too long. "Bugs" and "events" are also folders that take a while to build).
2.7. You can review the output of all the website builds in /srv/www.debian.org/www (or via web in the staging site ).
3. Once the installation images are ready, you can rebuild News/YYYY (e.g. News/2023) so the last translations of the announcement get published, and the folders that we built in the steps above are pushed to mirrors (and the website looks updated and with links to the updated images):
sudo -u debwww /srv/www.debian.org/update-part News/2023
This step may take more than 15 minutes.
4. And finally, undo the changes in crontab so the next website build runs as usual:
sudo -u debwww crontab -e
(the next rebuild will automatically rebuild the /security and other folders, if needed)