Here are the steps to follow to create a new pixman release: 1) Ensure that there are no uncommitted changes or unpushed commits, and that you are up to date with the latest commits in the central repository. Here are a couple of useful commands: # This should report "nothing to commit (working directory clean") git status # This should give no output, (note there are *3* dots) git log master...origin 2) Verify that the code passes "make distcheck". NOTE: There is some test code in the test directory, but it's not yet integrated into "make distcheck" yet. It might be useful to run those programs, (but I don't know how to interpret those results). Another very useful thing to do is to run the cairo test suite against pixman. This can be done by running the following commands with the latest cairo release: tar xzf cairo-X.Y.Z.tar.gz cd cairo CAIRO_TEST_TARGET=image make test 4) Increment pixman_{major|minor|micro} in configure.ac according to the directions in that file. Also note that if there is an ABI change then there is further work to be done, (also described in configure.in). 5) Use "git commit" record any changes made in steps 3 and 4. 6) Generate the final tar files with make distcheck And publish the tar files to everywhere appropriate. Note: There's a "make release-publish" target to help with this step, (creating the tar file and publishing it), but it depends on getting gpg setup first. It's probably the right way to go in the future, though. 7) Increment pixman_micro to the next larger (odd) number in configure.ac. Commit this change, and push all commits created during this process. 8) Send email announcements of the release to everywhere appropriate.