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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.

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: backport and bundler: backport 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.

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_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 (cd bundler && bin/rake 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_version>].
  • Add the new stable branch x.y where x.y are the first two components of the rubygems version being released to the CI workflows as an extra commit on top of what the prepare_release task generated.
  • Create a PR to the main branch, and merge it once CI passes.
  • From the main branch, cut a new stable branch with git pull && git checkout -b x.y.
  • Push the stable branch and wait for CI to be green.
  • Release bundler with (cd bundler && bin/rake 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 Together you can help extend support for older RubyGems versions.