releasing.txt

To make a release of Wayland, follow these steps.

  0.  Verify the test suites and codebase checks pass.  All of the
      tests should either pass or skip.

      $ make check

  1.  Update the first stanza of configure.ac to the intended version.

      Then commit your changes:

      $ export RELEASE_NUMBER="x.y.z"
      $ export RELEASE_NAME="[alpha|beta|RC1|RC2|official|point]"
      $ git status
      $ git commit configure.ac -m "configure.ac: bump to version $RELEASE_NUMBER for the $RELEASE_NAME release"
      $ git push

  2.  Run the release.sh script to generate the tarballs, sign and
      upload them, and generate a release announcement template.
      This script can be obtained from X.org's modular package:

        http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/util/modular/tree/release.sh

      The script supports a --dry-run option to test it without actually
      doing a release.  If the script fails on the distcheck step due to
      a testsuite error that can't be fixed for some reason, you can
      skip testsuite by specifying the --dist argument.  Pass --help to
      see other supported options.

      $ release.sh .

      For Wayland official and point releases, also publish the publican
      documentation to wayland.freedesktop.org:

      $ ./publish-doc

  3.  Compose the release announcements.  The script will generate
      *.x.y.z.announce files with a list of changes and tags.  Prepend
      it with a human-readable listing of the most notable changes.
      For x.y.0 releases, indicate the schedule for the x.y+1.0
      release.

  4.  PGP sign the release announcements and send them to
      wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org

  5.  Update releases.html in wayland-web with links to tarballs and
      the release email URL.

      The wl_register_release script in wayland-web will generate an HTML
      snippet that can be pasted into releases.html (or e.g. in emacs
      insert it via "C-u M-! scripts/wl_register_release x.y.z") and
      customized.

      Once satisfied:

      $ git commit ./releases.html -m "releases: Add ${RELEASE_NUMBER} release"
      $ git push
      $ ./deploy

For x.y.0 releases, also create the release series x.y branch.  The x.y
branch is for bug fixes and conservative changes to the x.y.0 release,
and is where we create x.y.z releases from.  Creating the x.y branch
opens up master for new development and lets new development move on.
We've done this both after the x.y.0 release (to focus development on
bug fixing for the x.y.1 release for a little longer) or before the
x.y.0 release (like we did with the 1.5.0 release, to unblock master
development early).

    $ git branch x.y [sha]
    $ git push origin x.y

The master branch's configure.ac version should always be (at least)
x.y.90, with x.y being the most recent stable branch.  The stable
branch's configure.ac version is just whatever was most recently
released from that branch.

For stable branches, we commit fixes to master first, then cherry-pick
them back to the stable branch.