Release process

This is a draft

The data carpentry lessons have, similarly to software, 2 active version:

• stable (are moved to branches at the date of release)
• development (takes place in the master branch)

New features, challenges, moving around material from the lessons happens in the development version. Development happens in the master branch. There is a one month freeze period during which pull requests leading to modifications of the content of the lessons (anything other than fixing typos and bugs) will not be merged. This allows for the content of the lessons to not change too much and leave time for instructors to be familiar with them before they need to teach it.

All teaching should be done from the stable lessons. Stable lessons are released every 3 months. Fixing typos and bugs can be done for the active stable version. We strive to go through a comprehensive review process of the lesson before they are released to limit the need for fixing things once a lesson is released. Stable versions are named vYYYYMM.x where YYYY represents the 4-digit year, MM the 2-digit month, and x the minor version number (e.g., v201702.0 for the initial version of the lesson released in February 2017).

Checklist of tasks to complete before release:

• check that the learning objectives reflect the content of the lessons
• check for typos
• check that the live coding examples work as expected
• check that challenges and their solutions work as expected
• check that the setup instructions are up to date (e.g., update version numbers as needed)
• check that the data is available and that mentions to data in the lessons is accurate
• check that all the links within the lessons work
• update README as needed
• update the release notes NEWS