Determine the baseline Rust version¶

Each major version of Ferrocene is based off a Rust version, usually the latest one available at the point the release was branched off the rolling branches. Once the baseline is chosen, it will be possible to upgrade to newer patch releases of Rust, but not to new minor or major Rust versions.

The decision of the baseline Rust version for a new Ferrocene major version is made within the team. Once chosen, all development work will be done in the release/1.NN branch, where NN is the minor Rust version number.

Determine the Ferrocene version number¶

Each major version of Ferrocene’s version number is YY.MM, where YY and MM are the planned year and month of the first release of that major version. For example, the first release of Ferrocene 23.11 would be published on November 2023.

Each major version will have multiple point releases, identified by an incrementing number starting from 0 (the initial release of that major version). The format of a release’s version number is YY.MM.N, where YY and MM are the year and month of the major version’s first release (not the year and month when the point release was published), and N is the number of the point release.

For example, Ferrocene 23.11.3 is the fourth release of Ferrocene 23.11, first released in November 2023.

If this is the first release of a major Ferrocene version, schedule when the release will be published: use that as the major version, and use YY.MM.0 as the release’s version number.

For any following point release, keep the same year and month as the previous release, and increment the previous point release number.

Branching from rolling into beta¶

The first step to prepare a stable releases is to promote a rolling branch into the beta channel of the release. To do so, open a new PR targeting the release/1.NN branch changing:

• ferrocene/version with the full version number of the release.

• ferrocene/ci/channel with beta.

Once the PR is merged, the release process will start automatically publishing the latest commit on that branch into the beta-${major_version} channel every night. You can then continue landing changes into the branch until you are ready to release it as a stable release.

Uploading the qualification technical report¶

Once qualification is achieved for the Ferrocene major version, the technical report provided by the assessors needs to be uploaded to our AWS account with:

aws --profile ferrocene-ci s3 cp path/to/report.pdf s3://ferrocene-ci-mirrors/manual/tuv-technical-reports/YYYY-MM-DD-ferrocene-VERSION-technical-report.pdf

In the command above, path/to/the/report.pdf is the local path to the downloaded file, YYYY-MM-DD is the current date (not the version number), and VERSION is the version number.

Once the file is uploaded, open a new PR targeting the release/1.NN branch changing ferrocene/ci/configure.sh. In that file, find the line setting the technical-report-url option, if commented uncomment it, and replace the URL with the s3:// URL you just uploaded.

Publishing a stable release¶

To publish a stable release, you need to first open a PR targeting the release/1.NN branch, changing the contents of ferrocene/ci/channel to stable.

Once the PR is merged, you need to grab the commit hash of the merge commit, start a manual release on the dev environment, and perform the Release Validation.

Once the release validation succeeded, start a manual release on the prod environment. The release will require approval from the release managers.

Finally, you need to send another PR targeting the release/1.NN branch, changing ferrocene/ci/channel back to beta and incrementing the point release version in ferrocene/version by 1. Note that you might need to remove some digital signatures when you increment the version number.