Storybook Release Proposal v4

RELEASE_v4.md

Storybook Release Proposal v4

Fourth iteration of the Storybook release process (v1, v2, v3), updated to reflect learnings from the 4.0 release.

What we're doing now

• We respect semver for all releases to the best of our ability
• release/x.y (e.g. release/3.4) branch is released as a patch every week (e.g. 3.4.X)
• master is released on the alpha tag every week (e.g. 4.0.0-alpha.X)
• All major/minor releases get a blog post (e.g. 3.2)

Proposed changes

• Release much more often, follow semver but don't worry about batching up changes -- focus on steady improvement.
• Two branches: master and next. master contains the current stable release. next is the default branch, and contains the next release.
• Workflow between next and master is identical to the previous workflow between master and release/X.Y (cherry-pick patches as needed). The existing setup is confusing, and we hope that the new setup is slightly less confusing.
• Release from next to the next NPM tag every week. Will use suffixes like alpha/beta/rc to denote status, e.g. 4.1.0-alpha.0 would be released next tag.
• Release from master to the latest NPM tag every week and/or coordinating with a release post for minor releases.
• Set minor release dates as soon as we have feature clarity and manage to those dates:
  • Date should be a Monday so if we slip we don't get pushed into the weekend
  • T-3wk:
    • Draft announcement and socialize
    • Announce dates in #maintenance so people can reat
  • T-1wk:
    • If you want your feature in the release, it should already be released on next by this time
    • Create release branch and only cherrypick bugfixes
    • Set up launch plan

As a contributor

• Issue all PRs against the next branch.
• We'll cherry-pick bugfix and documentation PRs into master as appropriate.