xserver release process and gitlab

[Adam Jackson]

I was asked off-list what tasks are involved in releasing a new X
server, since eventually people are probably going to want one.

And that's a good question! The unfortunate answer is that the process
has been informal and has varied over time. We have often used tracking
bugs in bugzilla to define the set of remaining issues to address
within a release, but we're not using bugzilla anymore. So I think it's
probably a good idea to start with the processes available to us in
gitlab. From what I can tell, "milestones" are the best fit for this.
I've created a starter milestone to track 1.21:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/milestones/1

Anyone with "developer" access or higher to the xserver project should
be able to edit this milestone, but the release manager (whoever that
ends up being) should have final editorial control. If you think an
issue should be added to this milestone, comment on the issue or find a
developer who can nominate it for you. I'll take a pass through the
issue list in the next few days and nominate some likely bugs.

In general, candidate issues for a major release include crash fixes,
regressions, and major feature work. The release manager should ensure
all such issues have assignees, and check in on their progress
regularly.

Establishing a release schedule should itself be one of the issues
resolved for a given release (since you can't comment on a milestone
proper, only on issues attached to it). So let's do that here:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/issues/688

We don't currently have formal acceptance criteria for a release,
though an obvious minimum would be to have 'ninja -C build test' pass
on all major platforms in CI. We should document this testing process,
as well as define criteria for adding additional acceptance criteria.

Vaguely related to all this is that we badly need to get our
documentation moved from the old wiki to gitlab. There's an open issue
for this, but it's a few months inactive:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freedesktop/freedesktop/issues/80

If any of this sounds too crazy, or if there are other things we need
to address, please let us know so we can address them.

- ajax