Rustup: Ensure release process reliably and effectively communicates releases to distro packagers

[svenstaro]

Hello, yesterday you appear to have released 1.24.1 as per the changelog but you didn't make a tag for it. Could you please publicize the tag?

[kinnison]

We did not release 1.24.1 yesterday, we've asked for beta testing. We will announce when we release it.

We released 1.24.0 and then had to withdraw it due to a regression.

Again, 1.24.1 is NOT considered released yet, please do not publicise it as anything other than beta-grade.

[svenstaro]

How can I know whether something is a beta or a proper release? I'm asking as I'm the Arch maintainer for rustup and then had to patch 1.24.0 downstream.

[kinnison]

We announce when a new release is public, and the version number available from https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup/release-stable.toml - I'd recommend waiting an hour or two at least after that number updates in case we have to roll back. 1.24.0 is effectively withdrawn from use and should not be being published by Arch at this time.

I'm sorry for how awkward this release was, normally we can push a .1 out pretty quickly, but after this very unpleasant regression we wanted more time to double-check before trying again.

[rbtcollins]

We're going to work up an RFC for doing pre-release workflows etc, and will value your input on that. I think perhaps leaving this bug open to talk about that might be an idea.

That said, I think if we've published a binary image anywhere, having a tag that matches that is just a good practice, and costs us just some education - and perhaps figuring out how to be clear about the tag (e.g. tag it with a beta version number even if it was built with a release version number ... or something)

[svenstaro]

Some projects use the GitHub pre-release feature which is pretty good to communicate the state of a release.

[kinnison]

We have now released 1.24.1 and I've pushed the tag to the repository. Thanks for the pointer to pre-release functionality on github, I'll add that to the notes for sorting a better beta-testing process and thus a better release process all told.

Thank you also for looking after the Arch packages.

[svenstaro]

Cool, I pushed 1.24.1 to Arch repos.

[workingjubilee]

@rustbot label: +O-linux

[kinnison]

@svenstaro Since we currently don't have a process, I figured I'd ping you here to say 1.24.3 is out.

[svenstaro]

Thanks, pushing a new package.