Orion/Continuous Delivery

This page collects ideas, processes, and technology requirements for supporting continuous delivery of Orion

Overview

For the past couple of years, the Orion project has followed an abbreviated version of the classic Eclipse milestone development process. Each release consisted of two 6 week milestones, followed by a 5 week end-game, for a roughly 4 month total release cycle. This release cadence works well enough for classic software that is released and delivered to customers, but is not acceptable for Orion consumers building hosted software services. Four months is far too long to wait to update a web application. Other related web technology such as browsers and web frameworks are releasing much faster, and security bugs often require very fast (even zero day) turnaround.

This page captures the Orion community's efforts to move from three releases a year, to an interim goal of releasing stable builds once a week.

Builds

Orion runs with two classes of builds:

Build Type	Branch	Frequency	Deployed To
Dev	master	Daily or on demand	orion.eclipse.org
Stable	stable_YYYYMMDD	Weekly	orionhub.org

Stable build process

Each week we converge to produce a single stable build using the following process:

1. On Monday at 12:00 ET / 18:00 CET a new stable branch is created of the form stable_YYYYMMDD
2. A committer designated as the Integrator reviews all changes in master and merges into the stable branch
3. A stable build is performed against the stable branch and promoted to orion.eclipse.org
4. Committers test orion.eclipse.org and further stable builds are run as needed
5. The build is promoted as stable with the naming convention S# where # is the sequential stable build number since start of the release cycle

Release process

Every four months a stable build is promoted as a release.