Release Checklist

Notes

Burn In

Ensure that Parity DevOps has run the new release on Westend, Kusama, and Polkadot validators for at least 12 hours prior to publishing the release.

Build Artifacts

Add any necessary assets to the release. They should include:

• Linux binary
• GPG signature of the Linux binary
• SHA256 of binary
• Source code
• Wasm binaries of any runtimes

Release notes

The release notes should list:

• The priority of the release (i.e., how quickly users should upgrade) - this is based on the max priority of any client changes.
• Which native runtimes and their versions are included
• The proposal hashes of the runtimes as built with srtool
• Any changes in this release that are still awaiting audit

The release notes may also list:

• Free text at the beginning of the notes mentioning anything important regarding this release
• Notable changes (those labelled with B[1-9]-* labels) separated into sections

Spec Version

A runtime upgrade must bump the spec number. This may follow a pattern with the client release (e.g. runtime v12 corresponds to v0.8.12, even if the current runtime is not v11).

Old Migrations Removed

Any previous on_runtime_upgrade functions from old upgrades must be removed to prevent them from executing a second time. The on_runtime_upgrade function can be found in runtime/<runtime>/src/lib.rs.

New Migrations

Ensure that any migrations that are required due to storage or logic changes are included in the on_runtime_upgrade function of the appropriate pallets.

Extrinsic Ordering

Offline signing libraries depend on a consistent ordering of call indices and functions. Compare the metadata of the current and new runtimes and ensure that the module index, call index tuples map to the same set of functions. In case of a breaking change, increase transaction_version.

To verify the order has not changed, you may manually start the following Github Action. It takes around a minute to run and will produce the report as artifact you need to manually check.

The things to look for in the output are lines like:

• [Identity] idx 28 -> 25 (calls 15) - indicates the index for Identity has changed
• [+] Society, Recovery - indicates the new version includes 2 additional modules/pallets.
• If no indices have changed, every modules line should look something like [Identity] idx 25 (calls 15)

Note: Adding new functions to the runtime does not constitute a breaking change as long as the indexes did not change.

Proxy Filtering

The runtime contains proxy filters that map proxy types to allowable calls. If the new runtime contains any new calls, verify that the proxy filters are up to date to include them.

Benchmarks

There are three benchmarking machines reserved for updating the weights at release-time. To initialise a benchmark run for each production runtime (westend, kusama, polkadot):

• Go to https://gitlab.parity.io/parity/polkadot/-/pipelines?page=1&scope=branches&ref=master
• Click the link to the last pipeline run for master
• Start each of the manual jobs:
  • 'update_westend_weights'
  • 'update_polkadot_weights'
  • 'update_kusama_weights'
• When these jobs have completed (it takes a few hours), a git PATCH file will be available to download as an artifact.
• On your local machine, branch off master
• Download the patch file and apply it to your branch with git patch patchfile.patch
• Commit the changes to your branch and submit a PR against master
• The weights should be (Currently manually) checked to make sure there are no big outliers (i.e., twice or half the weight).

Polkadot JS

Ensure that a release of Polkadot JS API contains any new types or interfaces necessary to interact with the new runtime.