Zowe Milestones are time-base releases with an intended cadence of one release a month targeting the first Thursday. It consists of two week Sprints and a release candidate (RC) that may be made available at the end of the Sprint. By choosing monthly releases, it greatly simplifies communication and scheduling. Each Squad will decide if there will be a deliverable depending on the content that went into the Release. Squads are self governing and are free to have their own schedules as long as they meet the requirements of the release as defined by the community. As the project matures, nightly builds should be available for download, but might contain experimental features or bugs.
The ZLC is informed by the Release Manager that a new release is ready for public distribution. The ZLC will review the release and ensure that all requirements that are needed for legal and technical release are met. These include, but are not limited to, updated Documentation, correct LICENSE files, code scans show no known vulnerabilities and some spot testing at the ZLC's discretion.
The ZLC will create a vote thread on zowe-zlc@lists.openmainframeproject.org to vote for the release. +1 indicates concurrence, 0 is no opinion (and requires a reason to be given) and a -1 is a vote to block the release (rationale required). The vote is to last no more than 1 week but can be completed sooner when all ZLC votes are cast. The results will be communicated to the Release Manager.
The Release Manager will sign the release with their GPG keys for the Zowe project and the release will be made available. The release keys are to be publicly available in the release-management repository.
Should the vote not be unanimous a ZLC member may volunteer to work with the other members to address the issues raised. Should the issues be resolved the voting thread can then be updates with a new vote by the dissenter. When the votes are unanimous the a ZLC member, or the chair, will notify the release manager. The Release manager will then make the artifacts available and notify the OMP Director of the new release to track the LLC release of a new set of binaries.
Each release will be identified by a version number. These numbers are used according to a specific scheme that will give you additional information about the release. The version numbers are of the form x.y.z-[GA | beta | yyyymmdd] (Semantic Versioning) or major.minor.micro. The final designation indicates whether this is the official Generally Available (GA) version, a beta version or an interim build. Only releases that end with -GA are considered official releases.
- Following semantic versioning the following sequences can be assumed MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH
- MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
- MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
- PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.
- GA indicates that this release is an official, supported version of the Zowe project and is suitable for regular use.
- beta means that this build is a candidate build that is complete but is under active development and should not be considered for regular use.
- yyyymmdd indicates this is an interim build suitable for experimentation or development. It is not intended for general usage and may contain defects that are known and being worked or unknown.
The code can be found here.
There are two significant and different release artifacts for Zowe. The source release and the "convenience build."
The project officially release source code which can be built into an executable version of Zowe. This is the core deliverable of Zowe and is intended for downstream consumers that may use Zowe in their projects or products as well as other developers.
The "Convenience Build" is composed of courtesy release artifacts:
- An installer and all available artifacts to run and use Zowe on z/OS including sample applications.
- An offline installable version of the Zowe CLI. The CLI is split between two archives: a "core" archive containing the CLI base and Secure Credential Store, and a "plugins" archive containing community CLI plugins.
The convenience build is intended for consumers that simply want to use Zowe and its APIs. This is built from the source code release above. Code from other projects that have compatible open source licenses may be included to support overall Zowe capability. Like bash, git, python as well as zOS-Workflows or other related projects to facilitate a complete software stack for Zowe. Zowe may release its convenience build artifacts at the same time or independently of one another per project discretion and vote in accordance with the normal release process.
At the end of each Sprint, the Squads will present their work in the form of a Playback that is open to all where they will demonstrate the new capabilities introduced in the Sprint.
Calendar invites to the Zowe playbacks will be posted here.
Past Playbacks recordings are available here.
The various squads and Zowe Leadership Committee (ZLC) meet on a weekly basis. The squad schedules can be found here along with the meeting recordings and minutes.
The Zowe projects have three communication channels: a mailing list, a Slack channel, and a Waffle Board. Ypu can find more details about each communication channel on the Zowe website here.
All the conference calls are set up using Zoom. Each squad provides the details and call-in information in the invitation. To get an invitation, you must register on the Open Mainframe Project Group called "zowe-dev@lists.openmainframeproject.org" group at https://lists.openmainframeproject.org/g/zowe-dev
Once it has been decided to ship a release, the Zowe Build team publishes the deliverable along with all documentation.