Productize release train machinery?

[matthewadams]

NB: I'm not sure that this is the correct project to file this issue in, but it's a start. Feel free to close with direction on which Spring project to file this issue in.

IMHO, Spring Data has one of the most mature release processes in the industry, especially with the notion of release trains. This can probably be said of many Spring projects now.

I'm wondering if the Spring team would consider productizing the release train machinery and make it available as an open source project. I feel like many companies/dev teams could benefit from the rigor & best practices that your release train process employs.

[mp911de]

Appreciate your perception and feedback. We've practiced the release train idea for a couple years now, mostly by assigning fixed release days for each project. From there on, each project handles releases themselves. Theres a lot of preparation going into each release, from dependency coordination to notifying folks about release availability.

Each Spring project handles their release tooling differently according to their needs. Framework and Boot are mono-repo-like projects with (almost) a single build to build all artifacts while Data and Cloud projects reside in their own repos, sometimes even using different build infrastructure (Gradle, Maven) across projects being shipped in a single train.

That being said, there it's not so much about the tools (Data and Cloud release tools are open source already), it is more the established practice that glues everything together combined with being mindful about consequences of breaking or delaying things.

I'll take your feedback to the team and let's see where this goes.