NixOS 23.11 Retrospective

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TL;DR: Release retrospective in 17 hours!

Why?

To have a discussion around the stable release, and how to improve the process. This will be very similar in intent to previous retrospectives.

What?

We will hold a 1-hour meeting on Jitsi Meet to facilitate questions and have a discussion around what didn’t work well and how to improve. We’ll start by trying to collect and rank topics, and then walk through them in descending order. To keep the pace of discussion going, we’ll try to time-box the discussion (5 mins initial, with 2 minute extensions), so we don’t end up just talking about one topic the entire time.

Topics should be categorized into three sections:

  • What went well?
  • What was notable even if neutral
  • What went badly?

The desired outcome is to arrive at some “action items” which can be applied to improve the next NixOS release.

If we don’t arrive at the particular topic you were interested in, this doesn’t mean it wasn’t important, we just didn’t get around to it in this meeting. Feel free to post your topic to this thread to get a discussion started.

When? Where ?

2023-12-09T19:00:00Z → 2023-12-09T20:00:00Z

Who?

Anyone who has valuable feedback on the 23.11 release. If you attempted to contribute, contributed or used the release, you are welcome to participate.

Policy for this Discourse thread

Please feel free to add anything to the following topics in a post:

  • What went well?
  • What do you feel neutral about?
  • What did you feel negative about?

You can also start a discussion to other people’s posts, however, if a particular topic warrants its own thread, then it should probably be moved into its own thread. We would like to mainly keep this thread focused on discussion topics for the retrospective meeting.

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Some issues I noticed:

  • Some parts of the release process (notably branch-off) are hard to test, and it makes it hard to make changes to the process, or make policies that can potentially break the process

  • There doesn’t seem to be a clear timeline for the release editors, the only thing I found is

    Before the final release, re-check that the release editors have completed their work on the release notes

    but there is quite a large gap between release editors having completed their work on the release notes, and making sure that the same change can be backported to the release branch without issues. And the change would also need to get into nixos-23.11 for it to be present on nixos.org, which happened a few days after the release was announced.

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Issues, I’d like to talk about in the retro:

  • Missing timeline for Release Editors (as previously highlighted by @figsoda); I could draft up a timeline from my experience. Question: How close to the release date should the editing process be done?
  • Missing styleguide for the release notes; some contributors do not seem to care about language, when producing release note entries; there should be guidance in the form of a styleguide. Question: does this need an RFC?
  • Revisioning the structure of the release notes, as @alejandrosame did kinda last minute. I am undecided if we should stick to the old structure or adopt the new one for following releases.

Happy to talk to you in a bit!

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Upgrade was the smoothest yet for me. Could have sprinted everything in less than a day.

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