Release 1.6 Checklist

[ericspod]

This issue is to collect other issues and PRs that should be closed/merged for the upcoming 1.6.

Important PRs:

• Further CICD Cleanup #8867
• fix: only instantiate CrossAttentionBlock when with_cross_attention=True #8848

Important issues/Advisories:

• GHSA-qxq5-qhx6-94qw Fixed by Update Auto3DSeg #8586
• GHSA-wg9g-w2j2-8pgr Needs review -> Adding allow_pickle argument #8875
• GHSA-rghg-q7wp-9767

Nice-to-have PRs/Issues

• Improve Affine transform documentation and add compute_w_affine tests #8727
• Add explicit spatial_ndim tracking to MetaTensor #8765

Checklist

Release a candidate version

• Tag and release PYPI version [X.Y.Z]rc[K] following the contributing guide, need trigger release pipeline on blossom.
• Make sure all CI pipelines pass.

Verify the new PyPI release

• Check the PyPI page
• Test pip install monai==[X.Y.Z]rc[K] and run a few MONAI modules locally
• Test all installation commands mentioned in the installation guide and the primary README.

Quality assurance for the relevant repos

The new PyPI release candidate should be checked against all the relevant repositories under Project-MONAI, for example, the tutorials repo:

• Run all Jupyter notebooks, replace pip install monai with pip install monai==[X.Y.Z]rc[K].
• File new tickets and create new pull requests to address any technical issues.
• Release a new candidate after addressing all the issues.
• Testing related repositories
  • MONAI unit and integration tests
  • MONAI tutorial tests
  • MONAILabel unit and integration tests
  • MONAI model zoo tests
  • QA regression tests

Prepare documentation

• Draft a release note on GitHub.
• Draft a release note with a pull request to modify the CHANGELOG.
• Create a pull request to highlight the features of the upcoming release, for example, in docs/source/highlights.md.
• Create a pull request to update the primary README.md.
• Update the project-monai.github.io website (https://github.com/Project-MONAI/project-monai.github.io).
• Check all the URLs in https://project-monai.github.io
• Check all the URLs in https://monai.readthedocs.io/en/stable/.

Release a milestone version

• Tag and release PyPI version [X.Y.Z] following the contributing guide.
• Check the dockerhub auto-build by running docker pull projectmonai/monai:X.Y.Z and docker run ...
• Check jupyter lab/notebook in the docker container
• Check readme frontpage on dockerhub, pypi
• Update https://github.com/Project-MONAI/MONAI/blob/dev/CITATION.cff
• Publish the release note on GitHub.
• Update the weekly-preview tagging https://github.com/Project-MONAI/MONAI/blob/master/.github/workflows/weekly-preview.yml#L32 and https://github.com/Project-MONAI/MONAI/blob/master/.github/workflows/weekly-preview.yml#L69
• Release the corresponding conda-forge version https://github.com/conda-forge/monai-feedstock