1 GStreamer Release Policies (or: why we should become a country and pass laws)
2 --------------------------
6 Development period is marked by having a fourth (nano) version number of 1.
7 During development anything goes short of wiping the tree.
8 Just try doing a few basic things :
9 - make sure it builds for you !
10 - check what you're about to commit with cvs -Q diff -r
11 - preferably, keep an anonymous checkout around as well so you can
12 immediately update and check if your changes work in a clean tree as well
16 After a bit of development, people want a new release. This generally happens
18 - core developers get anxious to apply massive changes to the core bound
20 - a few important plugins decide, as if by magic, to work again (avi, mad, ...)
21 - thaytan or thomasvs get tired of being lazy.
23 Also, this should only be allowed after passing a few sanity checks :
24 - make distcheck should pass
26 - FIXME: should debs be built here ? If so, how ?
28 At this time, we need to do a few prereleases for general checking by all
29 interested developers. To minimize the impact on the rest of the core hacking,
30 we create a new CVS branch which will go through the pre-releases and finally
31 contain the definitive tarball for that version.
36 - www/bin/new-release is a release helper script. It automates a lot of the
37 tedious work. Now releasing looks like this:
40 - make sure all blocker bugs for that release are fixed or deferred
41 - make sure you have a local copy of all online files
42 - Make one or more prereleases
43 - Make sure you've got the latest clean CVS of the module
44 - Run bin/data-get in www/ to sync data from website
45 - Bump the nano number to > 2 (eg, first pre-release for
47 - Re-autogen if not in maintainer-mode (which you should be)
48 - run 'make release' to build the tarballs
49 - copy tarballs+md5 sums to the data/src/$module/pre/ dir
50 - Run bin/data-put in www/ to sync the new tarballs to the website
51 - Announce the availability of the new tarballs
52 - Tell the translation project by sending an email to
53 translation@iro.umontreal.ca, eg:
54 Subject: gst-plugins-bad-0.10.5.2.pot available
55 Tarball is at http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/src/gst-plugins-bad/pre/gst-plugins-bad-0.10.5.2.tar.bz2
56 FIXME: Not sure if the translation project bot parses version strings
57 with a nano correctly.
59 - bin/new-release (module) (version) (checkoutdir) (release name)
61 - allows you to update versioning in configure.ac
64 - adds a new releases/module/version.xml file and lets you edit
65 --> here you add/fix up the features (from ChangeLog) and check
67 - allows you to update NEWS file with snippets from RELEASE
69 - rebuilds docs for plugins
70 - rolls release tarballs and puts them in the local www/data tree
71 - uploads docs to website
72 - commits changes to po files
73 - shows you a diff for evaluation
75 - build packages to test
78 - Update the doap file to insert the new release info
79 - cvs commit in the tree
81 for example for 0.6.3 :
83 - bump nano number in configure.ac, commit
84 - if working in the "stable" release branch, update to this tag to freeze it:
85 cvs up -r RELEASE-0_6_3
86 - sync source and packages to website
87 + run /bin/data-put in www
88 - change versions in www/src/htdocs/entities.gst
89 - add entry on website
90 + Edit src/htdocs/news/news.xml and add a new item at the bottom.
91 - commit additions to website
92 - add versions and milestones in bugzilla
93 - upload new tarballs to gnome ftp
95 scp gstreamer-0.10.42.tar.gz master.gnome.org:
97 install-module gstreamer-0.10.42.tar.gz
99 - Send release announcements to:
100 gstreamer-devel@lists.sourceforge.net gstreamer-announce@lists.sourceforge.net kde-multimedia@kde.org gnome-multimedia@gnome.org
101 - Update freshmeat with new releases (get Uraeus to do it)
103 Old release notes - superceded by the www/bin/new-release script.
104 ----------------------------------------------------------------
107 - Decide on the next version number (major, minor or micro upgrade ?)
108 - Get a fresh copy to do the necessary tests on
109 - If this isn't on the stable branch (like for 0.6), then create a new branch;
110 - with 0.3.3 as an example, tag is BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3
111 cvs tag BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3-ROOT
112 cvs tag -b BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3
113 - update your local copy to the branch:
114 cvs update -r BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3
115 - Set the nano to 2 (in configure.ac, AS_VERSION)
116 - If this is a release candidate for a new major version, override
117 MAJOR/MINOR in configure.ac
118 - Do all updates/patches/changes for the release tarball in this branch
119 - Think of a good codename for the release
120 - Check the bug lists:
121 - The idea is to have all bugs for this milestone listed as fixed
122 - Check all of the bug reports with this version as a milestone, and verify
123 that these bugs are fixed, or reassign to a later milestone if not
124 - Check later milestone bugs, and if any of them are fixed, reassign to
126 - Check the list of bugs resolved with milestone HEAD, which should be
127 assigned to an actual milestone
128 - create a new $(version).xml file in www/src/htdocs/releases/$(module)
130 - Start updating the release notes on the www cvs tree
131 - create the base xml file in www/htdocs/releases/$/module)/$(version).xml
132 - grepping ChangeLog for contributors:
133 grep "<.*>" ChangeLog | perl -i -p -e 's@\d*-\d*-\d*\s*(.*)\s*<.*$@$1@' | sort | uniq
134 - use www/bin/bugzilla (module) (version) to get an xml list of the
135 bugs fixed in this version, and add it to the release .xml
136 - depending on how the API has changed update the libtool versioning
137 in configure.ac, AS_LIBTOOL
138 (Look at the libtool info page about versioning for guidelines)
139 (if MAJOR/MINOR version has changed, however, you can reset all to 0)
140 - FIXME: autotools have latest config.{guess,sub}
141 This is needed in order to support newer platforms.
142 On Debian install the autotools-dev package to get these.
143 Someone please add some more useful info here on how to do this
144 - while (IS_PRERELEASE)
146 - increase the nano number (starting with 2)
147 - check out a fresh anonymous copy
148 cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gstreamer.sf.net:/cvsroot/gstreamer \
149 co -rBRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3 gstreamer
150 - make distcheck, rpm build should pass, from a FRESH cvs tree
151 - media tests should be done
152 - source tarball should be installed and tested
153 - rpms should be installed and tested
154 - .2 tarball should be submitted to translation project
155 - put up tarball for a day
161 When we're satisfied with the prereleases, it's time to make the final tarball.
162 It's very important that the tarball we put out is fully checked, works as
163 planned, and generally is generated only ONCE by someone with a relatively
164 clean (and reference) system. We don't want to put out more than one tarball
168 - give the latest prerelease another good testing
169 - proofread the release notes
170 - run bugzilla with the correct module and milestone and include
171 the output in the release notes
172 bin/bugzilla gstreamer 0.7.5 >> src/htdocs/releases/gstreamer/0.7.5.xml
174 - verify all new translations are in and po files are updated
175 - run win32-update from toplevel to copy new versions and enum files
176 - copy www/htdocs/releases/$(module)/$(version) to RELEASE
177 - copy the list of changes, bugs fixed, and API changes and add them to NEWS
178 - update the ChangeLog to account for NEWS, RELEASE, and configure.ac,
179 mentioning the release name
180 - add === release (version) === to ChangeLog
181 - update web site docs
182 - release-specific docs should go in CVS
183 - change docs/current symlink
184 - remove the nano version number in configure.ac, AS_VERSION
187 for example for 0.6.3 :
188 cvs tag RELEASE-0_6_3
189 - run "make release", build rpms
190 - install on gnome's ftp
191 - for plugins docs: run "make update" in docs/plugins to update version info
192 - for docs: run "make upload" from gstreamer/docs to get the new docs online
193 - change www/src/htdocs/entities.gst with the new version numbers
194 - change www/src/htdocs/bugs/bugs.xml and add a new milestone
195 - possibly add new version and milestone to bugzilla
196 - add a news item to the news.xml
200 Time to bring the new version under the eyes of the public.
203 - FIXME: should we md5 the tarballs?
204 - upload to sourceforge
205 upload.sourceforge.net/incoming
206 administer the release
208 - FIXME: announcements
209 - gstreamer-{devel, announce} : a simple mail with RELEASE
211 - linux-audio-dev (if it's a big release) : a simple mail with RELEASE
213 - lwn (if it's a big release)
214 - send mail for translators with URL to .tar.bz2:
215 translation@iro.umontreal.ca
216 - Kick back, have a party, enjoy people coming in on IRC telling us how
218 - Later on, if necessary, merge back latest release branch to current dev
219 branch (if patches to source were made)
223 * get a diff between the branch root and the final release:
224 cvs diff -r BRANCH-RELEASE-0_7_5-ROOT -r RELEASE-0_7_5 > patch
225 * fix up this patch (remove RELEASE)
226 * and apply it to the HEAD branch
227 * update nano version to 1 in configure.ac
230 * change to a HEAD branch, make sure it's updated
231 * cvs diff -R -r RELEASE-0_3_4-30SECONDFRENCHMAN
232 gives a list of differences between head and release tag,
233 stuff with > is how it's in HEAD, < is in the rel branch
235 * cvs update -j BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_4
236 merges the difference made in that branch to the current source
237 this is what you want to use when merging back the branch
238 resolve conflicts and commit
240 Some various random comments that might or might not make sense :
243 * autoconf feature to allow building outside source dir
245 - Package version policy
246 - Use major.minor.micro versioning
247 - Before 1.0.0, Update micro until code and API are fairly stable,
250 Update major when code and api hit new level of stability or major features.
251 Update minor on API changes.
252 Update micro on API-compatible changes.
254 NOTES ON STARTING A NEW STABLE SERIES
255 -------------------------------------
256 - Given x.y.z being the last devel release, where y is an odd number
257 - all API/ABI/renaming changes should be done
259 - get a completely fresh checkout
260 - set GST_MAJORMINOR to x.(y + 1)
261 - reset libtool versioning to 0, 0, 0
263 - grep for possible non-updates of MAJORMINOR:
264 grep -r "0\.9" * | grep -v "0\.9\.6" | less -R
266 perl -i -p -e 's@0\.9(\.[^0-9])@0.10$1@g' (file) changes 0.9. -> 0.10.
267 perl -i -p -e 's@0\.9([^.])@0.10$1@g' (file) changes 0.9 -> 0.10