0015. The post-go-live plan lives in GitHub milestones
- Status: accepted
- Date: 2026-10-22
- Decided by: Ulf (maintainer), in the planning session that set up milestone 0; gate #82
Context
The build plan ended at the 0.5.0 go-live on 2026-10-18. The work after it (a guided first run, setting the real collection up on test, a stability release and new functionality) had no plan of its own: some of it sat in open issues (#10, #11, #12 and the to-verify issues), the rest only in conversation. Issues, dependencies and the maintainer's queues were already on GitHub, so a separate written plan would drift from them. The maintainer's planning rules put the plan into milestones, each with one checkable goal, a gate issue and a supporting deck.
Options considered
- GitHub milestones in build order, with the post-go-live work as build milestones — one milestone per phase, one issue per work item, Blocked-by links, a gate issue the maintainer closes; the new-functionality milestone is filled from the roadmap by a decision issue once testing is done.
- Roadmap only — every new piece of work is an enhancement placed on the public roadmap (Now / Next / Later), with no milestones; nothing would tie onboarding and testing together or gate the 1.0 release on them.
- A new written project plan — a phase list kept outside the repository; a second source next to the issues.
Recommendation at the time: option 1.
Decision
The post-go-live plan is five GitHub milestones in this order: 0 (Planning on GitHub), A (Onboarding), B (Set up and test), 1.0 (Stability release) and C (New functionality). Each has one goal, a rough duration, a gate issue assigned to the maintainer and a deck indexed in docs/milestones/README.md. What C holds is decided in #98 after B, from the roadmap's open enhancements. No new project plan is written outside the repository.
Consequences
- The order is the promise; milestones carry no due dates.
- Every milestone ends with a status report: its deck is updated with the work done, the decisions (each an ADR), a retrospective and what carries over, and its PDF is exported again, before the gate issue is closed.
- C is a build milestone fed from the roadmap; enhancements outside it stay on the roadmap as before.
- 1.0 waits on B: no stability release before the real collection has been set up and every workflow tested.
Links
Milestones 0 (4), A (5), B (6), 1.0 (3), C (7); gate issues #82, #88, #96, #97, #99; decision #98; decks commit 2e1b4f1.