Creating Release Candidates
Release Candidates (RCs) are pre-release versions of the next version of GitLab CE and EE. Release candidates are created automatically, though at times release managers may also decide to manually create an RC. The automatic creation of release candidates is handled by this scheduled job.
There should be no code changes between the final RC and what is released to the public.
About the “Release Candidate” naming
We call them “Release Candidates” as this simplifies our releasing/packaging
tools and scripts. This approach is coherent with packages.gitlab.com since our
RC packages are available under [gitlab/unstable].
Release Candidates creation.
The Release Candidates creation is part of the Monthly Release process and follows roughly the subsequent steps:
- Near the 22nd, Release Managers select the last green auto deploy branch. This one
will be used as the “cut” for the release, meaning everything up to the commit in
auto-deploybranch will be included in the release. - Stable branches for GitLab and GitLab-FOSS are created based from that branch. Stable branches are the sole source of future releases for that version.
- Release Managers tag a new version, creating a new Release Candidate.
Steps are detailed in the “17th” section of the Monthly Release template.