Major release rotation?

[BethGriggs]

Major releases take significant amounts of coordination and effort in advance of the release. This includes:

• Major release process (mechanics of creating the proposal several weeks in advance).
• Additional emphasis on CITGM triage of breaking changes and contacting module authors whom may be impacted.
• Coordinating release announcements.
• Working with OpenJS Foundation for release announcements/press outreach.
  • For the press outreach opportunities I've tried, where possible, to defer questions about specific features to the feature authors out of courtesy.

As it is such burnout inducing work to do on a reoccurring basis, I'd be inclined to suggest a rotation going forward (would also help share the knowledge around and reduce our bus factor).

[RafaelGSS]

+1. I'd include one additional person responsible to do the announcements/tweets and the release coordination.

This is just a suggestion, but it looks reasonable to have in the rotation:

• A releaser for each one of the active lines (as usual)
• A person to coordinate the release and in charge of any community announcement.

[BethGriggs]

This is just a suggestion, but it looks reasonable to have in the rotation:

• A releaser for each one of the active lines (as usual)
• A person to coordinate the release and in charge of any community announcement.

I understand the suggestion as a way of distributing the work. But, just to share my experience/observations: the person who is updating the release proposal and crafting the changelog each week is likely the person who has the most context of what is/is not going to make it into the release, so is also a good person to write the announcement outline. It'd be great if the announcement content was more crowdsourced from the wider collaborators/TSC (we tried this last time by doing it on GitHub and I think it worked well).

[mhdawson]

I agree with @BethGriggs's points and also think that the person leading the release should at least review the release announcement and be listed as one of the release announce authors.

I could see that other people could help write up the release annouce and even lead that specific part of the effort but the person doing the ongoing work to get the release out should be visible and recognized as the person doing that (unless of course they really don't want that for some reason).

[RafaelGSS]

I concur. I'm just thinking about what we could do to make the write-up phrase a bit easier for the releasers.

[ruyadorno]

Let's just update the docs to mention that we should make a call for releasers 3 months in advance. We can also automate that with a bot/Github Action if someone has the time to look into that.

[RafaelGSS]

Just did it for #nodejs-release-private channel

[RafaelGSS]

May we close it?

[BethGriggs]

@RafaelGSS, I think it is maybe worth adding a line to https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/main/doc/contributing/releases.md?plain=1#L1126-L1132 so it is also publicly documented?