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 - bin/new-release (module) (version) (checkoutdir) (release name)
44 - allows you to update versioning in configure.ac
47 - adds a new releases/module/version.xml file and lets you edit
48 --> here you add/fix up the features (from ChangeLog) and check
50 - allows you to update NEWS file with snippets from RELEASE
52 - rebuilds docs for plugins
53 - rolls release tarballs and puts them in the local www/data tree
54 - uploads docs to website
55 - commits changes to po files
56 - shows you a diff for evaluation
58 - build packages to test
61 - cvs commit in the tree
63 for example for 0.6.3 :
65 - bump nano number, commit
66 - if working in the "stable" release branch, update to this tag to freeze it:
67 cvs up -r RELEASE-0_6_3
68 - sync source and packages to website
69 - add entry on website; commit additions to website
70 - change versions in www/src/htdocs/entities.gst
71 - add versions and milestones in bugzilla
72 - Send release announcements to:
73 gstreamer-devel@lists.sourceforge.net gstreamer-announce@lists.sourceforge.net kde-multimedia@kde.org gnome-multimedia@gnome.org
74 - Update freshmeat with new releases (get Uraeus to do it)
77 Old release notes - superceded by the www/bin/new-release script.
78 ----------------------------------------------------------------
81 - Decide on the next version number (major, minor or micro upgrade ?)
82 - Get a fresh copy to do the necessary tests on
83 - If this isn't on the stable branch (like for 0.6), then create a new branch;
84 - with 0.3.3 as an example, tag is BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3
85 cvs tag BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3-ROOT
86 cvs tag -b BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3
87 - update your local copy to the branch:
88 cvs update -r BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3
89 - Set the nano to 2 (in configure.ac, AS_VERSION)
90 - If this is a release candidate for a new major version, override
91 MAJOR/MINOR in configure.ac
92 - Do all updates/patches/changes for the release tarball in this branch
93 - Think of a good codename for the release
94 - Check the bug lists:
95 - The idea is to have all bugs for this milestone listed as fixed
96 - Check all of the bug reports with this version as a milestone, and verify
97 that these bugs are fixed, or reassign to a later milestone if not
98 - Check later milestone bugs, and if any of them are fixed, reassign to
100 - Check the list of bugs resolved with milestone HEAD, which should be
101 assigned to an actual milestone
102 - create a new $(version).xml file in www/src/htdocs/releases/$(module)
104 - Start updating the release notes on the www cvs tree
105 - create the base xml file in www/htdocs/releases/$/module)/$(version).xml
106 - grepping ChangeLog for contributors:
107 grep "<.*>" ChangeLog | perl -i -p -e 's@\d*-\d*-\d*\s*(.*)\s*<.*$@$1@' | sort | uniq
108 - use www/bin/bugzilla (module) (version) to get an xml list of the
109 bugs fixed in this version, and add it to the release .xml
110 - depending on how the API has changed update the libtool versioning
111 in configure.ac, AS_LIBTOOL
112 (Look at the libtool info page about versioning for guidelines)
113 (if MAJOR/MINOR version has changed, however, you can reset all to 0)
114 - FIXME: autotools have latest config.{guess,sub}
115 This is needed in order to support newer platforms.
116 On Debian install the autotools-dev package to get these.
117 Someone please add some more useful info here on how to do this
118 - while (IS_PRERELEASE)
120 - increase the nano number (starting with 2)
121 - check out a fresh anonymous copy
122 cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gstreamer.sf.net:/cvsroot/gstreamer \
123 co -rBRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_3 gstreamer
124 - make distcheck, rpm build should pass, from a FRESH cvs tree
125 - media tests should be done
126 - source tarball should be installed and tested
127 - rpms should be installed and tested
128 - .2 tarball should be submitted to translation project
129 - put up tarball for a day
135 When we're satisfied with the prereleases, it's time to make the final tarball.
136 It's very important that the tarball we put out is fully checked, works as
137 planned, and generally is generated only ONCE by someone with a relatively
138 clean (and reference) system. We don't want to put out more than one tarball
142 - give the latest prerelease another good testing
143 - proofread the release notes
144 - run bugzilla with the correct module and milestone and include
145 the output in the release notes
146 bin/bugzilla gstreamer 0.7.5 >> src/htdocs/releases/gstreamer/0.7.5.xml
148 - verify all new translations are in and po files are updated
149 - run win32-update from toplevel to copy new versions and enum files
150 - copy www/htdocs/releases/$(module)/$(version) to RELEASE
151 - copy the list of changes, bugs fixed, and API changes and add them to NEWS
152 - update the ChangeLog to account for NEWS, RELEASE, and configure.ac,
153 mentioning the release name
154 - add === release (version) === to ChangeLog
155 - update web site docs
156 - release-specific docs should go in CVS
157 - change docs/current symlink
158 - remove the nano version number in configure.ac, AS_VERSION
161 for example for 0.6.3 :
162 cvs tag RELEASE-0_6_3
163 - run "make release", build rpms
164 - install on gnome's ftp
165 - for plugins docs: run "make update" in docs/plugins to update version info
166 - for docs: run "make upload" from gstreamer/docs to get the new docs online
167 - change www/src/htdocs/entities.gst with the new version numbers
168 - change www/src/htdocs/bugs/bugs.xml and add a new milestone
169 - possibly add new version and milestone to bugzilla
170 - add a news item to the news.xml
174 Time to bring the new version under the eyes of the public.
177 - FIXME: should we md5 the tarballs?
178 - upload to sourceforge
179 upload.sourceforge.net/incoming
180 administer the release
182 - FIXME: announcements
183 - gstreamer-{devel, announce} : a simple mail with RELEASE
185 - linux-audio-dev (if it's a big release) : a simple mail with RELEASE
187 - lwn (if it's a big release)
188 - send mail for translators with URL to .tar.bz2:
189 translation@iro.umontreal.ca
190 - Kick back, have a party, enjoy people coming in on IRC telling us how
192 - Later on, if necessary, merge back latest release branch to current dev
193 branch (if patches to source were made)
197 * get a diff between the branch root and the final release:
198 cvs diff -r BRANCH-RELEASE-0_7_5-ROOT -r RELEASE-0_7_5 > patch
199 * fix up this patch (remove RELEASE)
200 * and apply it to the HEAD branch
201 * update nano version to 1 in configure.ac
204 * change to a HEAD branch, make sure it's updated
205 * cvs diff -R -r RELEASE-0_3_4-30SECONDFRENCHMAN
206 gives a list of differences between head and release tag,
207 stuff with > is how it's in HEAD, < is in the rel branch
209 * cvs update -j BRANCH-RELEASE-0_3_4
210 merges the difference made in that branch to the current source
211 this is what you want to use when merging back the branch
212 resolve conflicts and commit
214 Some various random comments that might or might not make sense :
217 * autoconf feature to allow building outside source dir
219 - Package version policy
220 - Use major.minor.micro versioning
221 - Before 1.0.0, Update micro until code and API are fairly stable,
224 Update major when code and api hit new level of stability or major features.
225 Update minor on API changes.
226 Update micro on API-compatible changes.
228 NOTES ON STARTING A NEW STABLE SERIES
229 -------------------------------------
230 - Given x.y.z being the last devel release, where y is an odd number
231 - all API/ABI/renaming changes should be done
233 - get a completely fresh checkout
234 - set GST_MAJORMINOR to x.(y + 1)
235 - reset libtool versioning to 0, 0, 0
237 - grep for possible non-updates of MAJORMINOR:
238 grep -r "0\.9" * | grep -v "0\.9\.6" | less -R
240 perl -i -p -e 's@0\.9(\.[^0-9])@0.10$1@g' (file) changes 0.9. -> 0.10.
241 perl -i -p -e 's@0\.9([^.])@0.10$1@g' (file) changes 0.9 -> 0.10