Proposal

What tasks belong in #MW-X.YY-release projects:

• Before X.YY is released: Issues deemed blockers of the release (added by a human)
• After X.YY is released: Issues that are present in X.YY and are important enough to include in a point release (if it gets fixed). (added by a human)

How ReleaseTaggerBot should continue to provide useful information based on patches committed to master during a release's development:

• ReleaseTaggerBot should tag #MW-X.YY-release-notes on any task that had an associated patch merged into master during a release's development.
• At release time, all tasks marked as "Resolved" in #MW-X.YY-release-notes should be automatically listed as "Tasks closed in 1.27" in the Release Notes.
• All tasks still open are reviewed by a human:
  1. Is it a blocker of the release (as deemed by the release team, mostly Chad H, with me helping where I can)? Then go get someone to fix it now, change mind and make it not a blocker, etc etc
  2. Was some meaningful progress made worthy of a mention in the release notes? If yes, do something, if not, then it's great that the default was not to include this task.
  3. Remove from #MW-X.YY-release-notes is it shouldn't be included in the "Tasks closed in 1.27" part of the Release Notes.
  4. etc... Humans are great at this part.

Background

From discussion in #-releng:

16:50 < robla> why did ForrestBot tag T92796 as "MW-1.26-release" on August 22? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T92796#1564640
16:51 < legoktm> merged core patches get the tag of the next stable release
16:53 <+ greg-g> ForrestBot's idea is to see all tasks which were fixed in a given release, both for wmfXX branches and the big'uns.
16:53 <+ greg-g> I'm unsure of the helpfulness of the later
16:54 <+ greg-g> s/ForrestBot/ReleaseTaggerBot/ # 'twas renamed
16:55 < valhallas> oh, but 'WM-1.26-release' is also interpreted as 'should be fixed before the release', which is something different than 'a patch for this is in <branch>' :/
16:55 < legoktm> so far I've found it really useful for quickly identifying if a bug fix was backported to 1.25
16:55 <+ greg-g> valhallasw`cloud: right
16:55 < legoktm> I think it will prove to be useful when we start writing up [[MediaWiki 1.26]] and other release notes
16:56 <+ greg-g> legoktm: but what about edge cases like the one robla linked where the patch doesn't actually resolve the issue?
16:56 <+ greg-g> is that "noise" manageable?
16:56 < legoktm> someone should manually remove the tag whenever they re-opened the bug
16:57 <+ greg-g> no one knows about the project
16:57 < robla> legoktm: "someone should manually..." seems like a dangerous way to start a sentence :-)
16:57 <+ greg-g> (It's not just a "tag" in the parlance of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Project_management#Types_of_Projects, it's a "release")
16:57 < valhallas> greg-g: I think the answer is 'we don't know'. This is the first release that will have bugs tagged as MW-1.26-release
16:58 <+ greg-g> valhallasw`cloud: fair
16:58 < valhallas> and not even all of them yet
16:58 <+ greg-g> but I think maybe some confusion is caused by the thought that it is just a tag, not a release project
16:58 < valhallas> no, most of them should be in there, I think, because 1.25 was released at the hackathon
16:58 <+ greg-g> the mw-1.2X-release projects are... release projects, not just informational tags
16:58 < legoktm> we're just missing stuff that was merged between REL1_25 branch point and hackathon
16:59 <+ greg-g> so, what releasetaggerbot is doing shoudl really be tagged as "fixed-in-1.26" or similar
17:00 <+ greg-g> again, I thinmk that's the mental model discrepency: MW-1.26-release is meant to track blockers, whereas RTB is just tagging for inforamtional purposes what could be found by a query after the fact :)
17:00 < valhallas> *nod*
17:00 greg-g is thinking in his metadata/ontology brain right now, it's a scary place
17:02 legoktm wonders why phabricator doesn't add opengraph <meta> tags
17:03 <+ greg-g> legoktm: shush! quit trying to nerd-snipe me!
17:03 < legoktm> :P
17:05 < legoktm> ohhh, I haven't read wikitech-l yet
17:05 < robla> legoktm: :-) yeah, that's what prompted me to say something here
17:07 <+ greg-g> legoktm: heh :)
17:09 < robla> For 1.27, it might make sense to have nee Forrestbot use a new tag (e.g. "1.27-check-this") and then have a single blocking "MW-1.26-release" task which is "clear out the '1.27-check-this' queue"
17:09 < robla> er....MW-1.27-release, that is
17:09 <+ greg-g> not bad