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Over the next couple of weeks I'm working on fleshing out "job openings" and descriptions for people who want to help advance Rakudo Perl 6. I'll write more about this in a later post, and they're likely to appear in my OSCON and YAPC::EU talks.

One of the jobs we've already identified is "Release Managers", following closely on the Parrot model. Release managers are people that are responsible for executing Rakudo releases according to the release schedule. And like Parrot, we want this responsibility to be widely spread among a team of managers, and not always fall to the same person for every release. So, over the next month or so I'll be recruiting people to be release managers, starting with the August 2009 release. (The July 2009 release is likely to have a few significant changes -- most notably a "make install" target -- so I think it's better for me to do that one last release myself. Also I may want to coordinate the release with my talk.)

However, yesterday it occurred to me that thanks to github, it's entirely possible today for people to independently go through all of the steps of cutting and publishing a Rakudo release. So now I'm eager to have others try it and see what happens. At present the release steps are targeted to work primarily from Unix environments -- I haven't tested or attempted to cut a release from other operating systems. (I'll accept patches and suggestions for doing so, though! :-)

For those who want to try it, here are the basic steps for creating a Rakudo "practice release":

• Fork the Rakudo master repository on github.
• Follow the steps in the docs/release-guide.pod file, substituting your own github repo clone for the Rakudo master.
• Let us know "Hey, I just made a Rakudo release!" and point to your forked copy github repo. Or tell us where you ran into problems, so we can improve the process.
• Profit.

Some notes about creating "practice releases":

• It's okay to skip steps 1-3 of the release guide for practice releases
• You can also safely skip any steps that involve communicating with others, such as posting messages to the mailing lists or updating the wiki
• If you don't want to wait the 30+ minutes for a spectest run to complete, "make test" is sufficient for a practice release.
• Yes, it's even possible for you to test uploading the tarball to github -- just make sure to put it in your own repository and not in Rakudo's master. :-)

So, anyone want to give it a try? If you do, please let us know how it works out, and places where you think things can improve. I know that we'll be updating the release guide in response to feedback from others, as well as adding things like testing of "make install" and the like.

Thanks!

Pm