Suggestion: Track Subversion release process in our issue tracker

I dunno about others, but I find it kind of hard to keep track of the status
of any one of our releases as it going through the release process.
Generally speaking, I have just as much information as the release manager's
most recent status email. I propose that we use our issue tracker to track
release status.

I'm envisioning something like the following:

   * After the typical "So, uh, you guys wanna roll a X.Y.Z release
     candidate this weekend?" email discussion, we file a new TASK
     issue (against a new 'releases' subcomponent) for rolling that release.

   * This issue has the nifty feature of a visible "assigned to" username.
     So, while we can make David Anderson the default owner of that
     subcomponent, in the event he gets busy, someone else can volunteer to
     take that release off his hands.

   * The status of the release is tracked via comments. This includes
     things like the location of the unblessed tarballs, signatures and
     testing reports of the tarballs, and so on. If we really want to
     we can use issue states, too: OPEN, STARTED, RESOLVED/FIXED (the
     tarballs are posted), VERIFIED (the signatures are all in), CLOSED,
     etc.

   * If there are bugs found which block the release, we can demonstrate
     this by making the release-tracking issues "depend on" the defect
     issues.

Thoughts?

-- 
C. Michael Pilato <cmpilato@collab.net>
CollabNet   <>   www.collab.net   <>   Distributed Development On Demand