Write a 'Break-Glass Manual'

[trexfeathers]

When something unexpected and urgent arises, it usually requires detailed discussion between core developers about how to action it. But most of these scenarios have been seen before, and we've made the decision before!

Example problems

• A bug from a mistake in Iris' code
  • Affects many users
  • Affects corner cases
• A bug from a dependency change
  • Affects many users
  • Affects corner cases
• Benchmark regressions
  • Major
  • Minor
  • Repeatable
  • One-off

Example solutions

• Announcement in What's New
• Announcement in GitHub release discussion
• Patch release containing a fix
• Patch release containing a more helpful warning/error

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We should agree on the correct actions for these cases BEFORE they occur, and encode these decisions in a manual or do-nothing script or something similar. This would provide several benefits:

• Eliminate debates when time-critical things arise
• We can immediately get an idea for the resource needed to action the problem
• We have a 'definition of done' for when the 'event has ended'
• Easy to iterate as we discover new examples or our opinions evolve