19 Making Releases

From time to time, at the project lead's discretion, a release will be made and tarballs created and made available on the SXEmacs download site.

The decision as to when to cut a release is generally influenced by two factors:

1. How stable the code base is currently.
2. Whether the changes since the last release warrant a new release.

The minimum number of revisions between releases is one. The maximum number of revisions between releases is, well, there is no maximum.

The actual steps involved in cutting a release are:

• Finalise things like...
  • Update etc/NEWS
  • Make sure INSTALL, PROBLEMS etc are up to date.
  • Update sxemacs.texi at...

    It corresponds to: version-string

  • Update the codename and version in autogen.sh
  • Update the versioning macros in this document.
• Commit those updates.

  git commit -sam "SXEmacs v22.1.14 is released!"

• Create a new tag which will be the version number of this release.

  git tag -s v22.1.14 -m "SXEmacs v22.1.14"

• Push it to the public repo.

  git push --tags origin master

• Prepare tarball:

  (in the release working directory)

            git archive --format=tar \
                --prefix=sxemacs-22.1.14/ HEAD | \
                (cd ~/upload && tar xf -)
  

• Clean out the working directory and do autotool preparations.

            HAMMER=1 ./autogen.sh
  

• Copy the autotool files to the exported tree

            mkdir -v ~/upload/sxemacs-22.1.14/libltdl &&
            for f in $(git ls-files --others -i --exclude-standard); do
                cp -va ${f} ~/upload/sxemacs-22.1.14/${f}
            done
  

• Add a ChangeLog

            git log --stat v22.1.13..v22.1.14 > /tmp/sxemacs-22.1.14/ChangeLog
  

• Create the tarball:

            cd ~/upload
            for type in bz2 gz lzma xz; do
                tar --create --owner=0 --group=0 --auto-compress --file \
                    sxemacs-22.1.14.tar.${type} sxemacs-22.1.14
                md5sum sxemacs-22.1.14.tar.${type} > sxemacs-22.1.14.tar.${type}.md5
                gpg --detach-sign --armor \
                  --output sxemacs-22.1.14.tar.${type}.asc sxemacs-22.1.14.tar.${type}
            done
  

• Create a diff against the previous version.
  • Unpack the previous release's tarball

  •                diff -urNp sxemacs-22.1.13 sxemacs-22.1.14 > sxemacs-22.1.13-22.1.14.diff
                   gzip sxemacs-22.1.13-22.1.14.diff
    

• Create md5 and gpg sig for diff file.

  See items describing this for the release tarball.

• Move the tarball, diff, GnuPG sigs, and md5sums to SXEmacs Download Site.
• Rename the LATEST-IS-foo file.

            mv LATEST-IS-22.1.13 LATEST-IS-22.1.14
  

• Update www.sxemacs.org:
  • Update download.html
  • Add ChangeLog-22.1.14 to the website
  • Update index.html
• Send a release announcement to SXEmacs Devel and comp.emacs.xemacs.
• Make a new release and announcement on Freshmeat (our FM id: 52281)
• Commit the first patch to the next version, which would be adding a ChangeLog.d/ChangeLog-22.1.14