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POLICIES.md

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Pull Requests

Contributions to RubyGems are made via GitHub pull requests, which must be approved by a project committer other than the author. To approve a PR, a maintainer can use GitHubs PR review feature. After that, if the original author is happy to merge the PR, she can press the merge button.

Long-Term Support

RubyGems will support Ruby versions for as long as the Ruby team supports that Ruby version. That means that the latest RubyGems release will always support the currently-supported Ruby versions, and RubyGems security fixes will be released for any RubyGems version that shipped inside a currently-supported Ruby version.

Bugfix Releases

RubyGems generally releases bugfixes from the master branch. We may mix bug fixes and new features in the same release. RubyGems does not guarantee it will ship bugfix releases for previous minor or major versions.

For example, after RubyGems 2.5 is released, the RubyGems team will not provide non-security fixes for RubyGems 2.4, or any earlier versions.

Security Releases

Security releases will be made for RubyGems minor versions that were included in a currently-supported Ruby release.

For example, since RubyGems 2.0 was shipped in Ruby 2.0, RubyGems 2.0 will receive security fixes until Ruby 2.0 reaches end-of-life.

Ruby Version Support

When a Ruby version reaches end-of-life the following minor release of RubyGems will drop backwards compatibility with that Ruby version.

For example, since Ruby 2.2 has reached end-of-life, future RubyGems minor releases will only support Ruby 2.3 and above. As of this writing RubyGems is at version 2.7, so when RubyGems 2.8 is released, it will only support Ruby 2.3 and later.

Release Process

Permissions

You'll need the following environment variables set to release RubyGems & Bundler:

  • AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: to be able to push RubyGems zip files to s3 so that they appear at RubyGems download page.

  • GITHUB_RELEASE_PAT: A GitHub PAT with repo permissions, in order to push GitHub releases and to use the GitHub API for changelog generation.

Recommendations for security releases

  • Obtain CVE numbers as needed from HackerOne or Red Hat.
  • Agree on a release date with ruby-core, so patches can be backported to older Ruby versions as needed.
  • Avoid releasing security updates on Fridays, so platform services don't have to work on weekends.
  • Continue with the regular release process below.

Branching

Bundler releases are synchronized with rubygems releases at the moment. That means that releases for both share the same stable branch, and they should generally happen together.

The current conventional naming for stable branches is x+1.y, where x.y is the version of bundler that will be released. This is because rubygems-x+1.y will be released at the same time.

For example, rubygems-3.2.0 and bundler-2.2.0 were both released from the 3.2 stable branch.

Once a stable branch has been cut from master, changes for that minor release series are only made intentionally, via patch releases. That is to say, changes to master by default won't make their way into the current stable branch, and development on master will be targeting the next minor or major release.

There is a rake prepare_release[<target_rubygems_version>] rake task that helps with creating a release. It takes a single argument, the exact rubygems release being made (e.g. 3.2.3 when releasing bundler 2.2.3). This task checks out the appropriate stable branch (3.2, for example), grabs all merged but unreleased PRs from both bundler & rubygems from GitHub that are compatible with the target release level, and then cherry-picks those changes (and only those changes) to a new branch based off the stable branch. Then bumps the version in all version files, synchronizes both changelogs to include all backported changes and commits that change on top of the cherry-picks.

Note that this task requires all user facing pull requests to be tagged with specific labels. See Merging a PR for details.

Also note that when this task cherry-picks, it cherry-picks the merge commits using the following command:

$ git cherry-pick -m 1 MERGE_COMMIT_SHAS

For example, for PR #5029, we cherry picked commit dd6aef9, not 4fe9291 using:

$ git cherry-pick -m 1 dd6aef9

After running the task, you'll have a release branch ready to be merged into the stable branch. You'll want to open a PR from this branch into the stable branch and provided CI is green, you can go ahead, merge the PR and run release tasks as specified below from the updated stable branch.

Automatic changelog and backport generation

PR labels and titles are used to automatically generate changelogs for patch and minor releases.

When releasing, a changelog generation script goes through all PRs that have never made it into a release, and selects only the ones with specific labels as detailed in the .changelog.yml and bundler/.changelog.yml files. Those particular PRs get backported to the stable branch and included in the release changelog.

If PRs don't have a proper label, they won't be backported to patch releases.

If you want a PR to be backported to a patch level release, but don't want to include it in the changelog, you can use the special rubygems: skip changelog and bundler: skip changelog labels. For example, this is useful when backporting a PR generates conflicts that are solved by backporting another PR with no user visible changes. You can use these special labels to also backport the other PR and not get any conflicts.

Breaking changes

Bundler cares a lot about preserving compatibility. As a result, changes that break backwards compatibility should (whenever this is possible) include a feature release that is backwards compatible, and issue warnings for all options and behaviors that will change.

We only release major breaking changes when incrementing the major version of Bundler and RubyGems. However, experience shows that almost every single part of Bundler and RubyGems is depended on by someone in ways hard to anticipate. So if we were strict about breaking changes we'd need to hold on from making progress a lot, or continuously increment the major version, emptying "really major" versions from their meaning. Because of this, we also may release "small" breaking changes in minor releases. "Small" here means that we expect them to affect only very few users in rare cases.

Steps for patch releases

  • Confirm all PRs that you want backported are properly tagged with rubygems: <type> or bundler: <type> labels at GitHub.
  • Run rake prepare_release[<target_rubygems_version>]. This will create a PR to the stable branch with the backports included in the release, and proper changelogs and version bumps. It will also create a PR to merge release changelogs into master.
  • Once CI passes, merge the release PR, switch to the stable branch and pull the PR just merged.
  • Release bundler with rake bundler:release.
  • Release rubygems with rake release.

Steps for minor and major releases

  • Confirm all PRs that you want listed in changelogs are properly tagged with rubygems: <type> or bundler: <type> labels at GitHub.
  • Run rake prepare_release[<target_rubygems_version>]. This will create a new stable branch off the master branch, and create a PR to it with the proper version bumps and changelogs. It will also create a PR to merge release changelogs into master.
  • Replace the stable branch in the workflows with the new stable branch, and push that change to the release PR.
  • Replace version numbers with the next ".dev" version, and push that change to the master PR.
  • Once CI passes, merge the release PR, switch to the stable branch and pull the PR just merged.
  • Release bundler with rake bundler:release.
  • Release rubygems with rake release.

Committer Access

RubyGems committers may lose their commit privileges if they are inactive for longer than 12 months. Committer permission may be restored upon request by having a pull request merged.

This is designed to improve the maintainability of RubyGems by requiring committers to maintain familiarity with RubyGems activity and to improve the security of RubyGems by preventing idle committers from having their commit permissions compromised or exposed.

Changing These Policies

These policies were set in order to reduce the burden of maintenance and to keep committers current with existing development and policies. RubyGems work is primarily volunteer-driven which limits the ability to provide long-term support. By joining Ruby Central you can help extend support for older RubyGems versions.