storybook release process v7

RELEASE_v7.md

Storybook Release Process v7

Seventh iteration of the Storybook release process (v1, v2, v3, v4, v5, v6), updated to reflect learnings from the 5.0 release.

What we're doing now

• We respect semver for all releases to the best of our ability
• master is released on the latest tag every week (e.g. 4.0.2)
• next is released on the next tag every week (e.g. 4.1.0-alpha.X)
• Bugfixes and docs changes cherry-picked from next to master on every release
• All major/minor releases get a blog post (e.g. 3.2)
• 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 = feature freeze and branch release/X.y
  • T - 2wk = release RC and call for testing
  • T - 0 = release but don't announce
  • T + 1-3d = announce

Rather than creating a release branch, we do all pre-releases from next. However after the feature freeze, we restrict merging PRs to next:

• YES bugfixes
• YES version upgrades that are security updates
• YES documentation
• NO new features / unncessary maintenance
• NO random version upgrades

Proposed changes

Defining alpha/beta/RC:

• Alpha: breaking changes OK
• Beta: no breaking changes (ideally)
• RC: no bugs that we know about