[Python-3000] The release process

[Barry Warsaw]

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I just announced the 2.6a1 and 3.0a3 releases, and am thawing both  
branches.

Just some quick feedback in case anybody is interested.  First, huge  
thanks go to Brett Cannon, Neal Norwitz, Mark Dickinson and Fred Drake  
for their help last night. Apologies also to them for my drunken rants  
on jabber :).  Also thanks to Martin von Loewis for the Windows msi's  
for Python 2.6.  I'm sure Martin will soon provide msi's for 3.0, but  
these are not yet available.

Some other random notes:

Brett fixed test_profile in 3.0 last night but test_cProfile was still  
broken.  I disabled the test via a TestSkipped and set this to  
expected in regrtest.py.  This test should be fixed and the expected  
skip removed.

I will definitely need help keeping the various NEWS files up to  
date.  I don't see any way that I'll be able to spend time on these  
when I'm cutting a release.  Python 2.6 NEWS was simply impossible to  
proofread because of its sheer size and the fact that it was the first  
alpha of the series.

PEP 101 describes 4 news files: Misc/NEWS and Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for  
both 2.6 and 3.0.  I am urgently requesting that when people commit  
newsworthy items to the Python releases that they keep the NEWS files  
up-to-date.  This is especially tricky for code merged between the two  
versions.  Thanks to Neal for looking over 3.0's NEWS file last  
night.  As RM, I am going to operate on the assumption that the NEWS  
files are up-to-date.  I'd be thrilled if someone volunteered to be  
the "NEWS czar" -- we all know when the next alpha release is coming  
(Friday March 25), so this czar would be responsible for watching  
commits and making sure that NEWS was updated as appropriate, or  
harassing the committer into updating NEWS to describe their new  
feature.  If you'd like to be this NEWS czar, please let me know.

With apologies to Anthony, welease is crack.  I made pretty good  
progress once I ditched it and starting doing things manually.   
Between now and the next alpha I intend to work on a command line  
script to help with releases.  If you're interested in helping, let me  
know.

PEP 101 is sorely out of date, especially with regards to updating web  
content and the Python documentation.  I think I now know how to  
update the python.org web site, but the new Python documentation  
format is still a mystery to me.  If someone would like to help update  
PEP 101 for the documentation steps, please let me know.

PEP 101 also describes some steps for updating the distutils version  
numbers.  These instructions seemed stale too.  If you know anything  
about distutils version numbers and the process for updating them,  
please contact me.

There's no Misc/RPM/python-3.0.spec file so I skipped that step too.   
Sean, do you know anything about that?

That's it.  See you again next time :).  Let me know if you notice  
anything broken about the releases.

- -Barry

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