I was going to write a post about how everybody can help with smoketesting GNOME 2.22.0, but Olav has been faster. Yeah, this guy can be annoying, he's always doing things a few minutes before you ;-) Fortunately, he didn't explain what smoketesting is, so I still have something to talk about. And if you're a maintainer of a GNOME module, read on too: we need your help to check at least one thing.

The smoketesting step is one of the last steps before the actual release: we build the whole GNOME stack from scratch and play with it for a while to be sure that there's no big last-minute bug or crasher. It should help catch the major problems in a release. We're doing this step for all stable and unstable release, but it's of course more important to do it right for stable releases, especially the .0 releases since we're trying hard to make crash-free and regression-free releases. The good thing here is that everybody can help with smoketesting. We have some smoketesting documentation if you want to help. This documentation should guide you through all the steps needed to smoketest GNOME 2.22.0. It was a bit outdated so I quickly updated it, so if there's some error, tell the release team about it, or leave a comment here. Alternatively, if you're an expert, you can simply read Olav's post which should be just what you need.

We also need help from maintainers: all of you should make sure that the versions file for 2.22.0 contains the right version for your modules. You'll notice that a few modules still have a 2.21 release as the latest one: evolution-webcal, file-roller, gnome-icon-theme, libgnomekbd and sabayon. We might still be able to use a 2.22.0 release for those modules if it doesn't come out too late. Contact the release team by mail or on IRC if you need help to release them.