Staging Branch-off

Requirement: The last staging-next cycle before the release started and staging is now unrestricted.

For these steps "24.05" represents the current release tag (the version you want to release).

nixpkgs branch protection ruleset

New staging branches (i.e. staging-24.05 and staging-next-24.05) should be added to rulesets/nixpkgs/require-merge-queue-except-periodic-merges.json.

You can propose the changes as a Pull Request to the NixOS/org repository. They can be applied by NixOS org owners or nixpkgs admin in advance.

Example: NixOS/org#258

Git branches

Set NEWVER to the new release version:

export NEWVER=24.05

Now create the branches:

  1. Fetch and check out the staging-next branch.

  2. Create the actual branches

    git branch staging-$NEWVER
git branch staging-next-$NEWVER

  3. Push the changes

    git push upstream staging-$NEWVER staging-next-$NEWVER

Incorporate new branches

We now incorporate the new branches into the workflows. The suggestion is two do step 1 and 2 in seperate PRs, as step 2. should be backported, as it's a CI change.

  1. Create new NixOS and Nixpkgs release notes file and PR this

  2. Update periodic-merge workflow so that

    • master gets merged into staging-next-24.05
    • staging-next-24.05 gets merged into staging-24.05

    and PR this.

  3. Create the backport label for the new staging branch:

    • backport staging-24.05

    Use the description Backport PR automatically and the color value #0fafaa