Added transparency around release schedule and process?

[hexpunk]

I love the extension and I find it super useful. I was affected by some minor but annoying bugs in the most recent release, specifically #722 and #804. I see that those issues are resolved, but I don't know when to expect the next release that should ship with the fixes.

I couldn't find any documentation in or around the repo about the release process or the release schedule. Maybe the particulars like how and when releases occur could be added somewhere. Perhaps a repo wiki or some markdown docs in the repo? Just a suggestion.

Keep up the awesome work!

[MikhailArkhipov]

POR is roughly monthly. You should be able to see milestones

[MikhailArkhipov]

Also https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

The extension aims to do a new release every month. A release plan is created for each release to help track anything that requires a person to do (long term this project aims to automate as much of the development process as possible). The current issues being worked on for a release are tracked in a milestone (which is actively updated as plans change).

The overall schedule for a release is to feature freeze for on the last Monday of the month to coincide with Visual Studio Code's code freeze. We then aim to release later that week so the latest version of the extension is already live by the time Visual Studio Code launches their new release. This is so we are ready to use any new features of Visual Studio Code the day they go live. We do bugfix-only releases between scheduled releases as necessary.

#686

[MikhailArkhipov]

Actually, @brettcannon - perhaps we should expose it better since plan is buried in the contribution notes.

[hexpunk]

Yeah, I didn't think to look there since I wasn't contributing. And I didn't think to look at the Milestones dropdown in issues since I'm not that familiar with all the sorting and labeling options for issues on Github. I'm a more casual user.

To be fair, I'm not sure what the February milestone actually means. Is that what gets released in March? Because #722 is marked as part of the February milestone, but it's about a week until March. Also, version 0.9.1/2018.1.0 was tagged on February first, so was that the January milestone?

And neither #804 nor the PR that addressed it, #823, has any milestone currently attached.

I promise I'm not being deliberately obtuse. I'm honestly unsure.

[MikhailArkhipov]

@jayandcatchfire - if you go to issues and click on Milestones button, you'll see milestone dates. Since development is in master, everything that is merged goes into the active milestone.

[hexpunk]

That's fantastic! Thanks for the prompt and detailed response.

I haven't used any of the more sophisticated project management features of Github, so I wouldn't have thought to check there.

[brettcannon]

So I'm not sure where to really surface this outside of the contributing guide since it's a technical detail of development as updates are automatically pushed. Maybe a sentence at the end of https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-python#questions-issues-feature-requests-and-contributions ? @qubitron what do you think?

[qubitron]

@brettcannon everyone will look in a different place so I think a good idea to add it to that section, something like "Check out our release planning (link) page to keep track of features and bugs coming in the next release"