Releasing a new version

Test phase

• First thing to do when planning a release is to propose it.
• If no-one complains branch off a release candidate which must be used for testing and bugfixing only - and finally will be released:

# cp -a <old directory name> <new directory name>
# cd <new directory name>
# hg pull && hg update
# hg tag -b <release tag name>-rc
# hg pull && hg update -r <release tag name>-rc

Normal glob2 development takes place in the original HEAD (i.e. MAIN) branch as usual.

• Now announce that you branched off the release candidate and that everyone who wants to help testing or fixing it must do:

# cp -a <old directory name> <new directory name>
# cd <new directory name>
# hg pull && hg update -r <release tag name>-rc

• Put a line like: "Changes in <release tag> (release soon)" under "Changes since latest release" in: Changes
• Increment version number in configure.in
• Increment Debian version number by doing debchange -i in debian/ (this must be done by nct on the mailing list)
• Do a release dry run, i.e.: all the release steps below except the "hg tag" and only propagate news about a release candidate - not a release.
• Now wait about a week.

Release phase

Here is a detailed description of the remaining release process applied for all the alpha releases:

1. Go into the directory containing glob2 the release candidate
2. Check that the local mercurial is up to date (through "hg pull && hg update")
3. Check that all the required graphics and maps are in the server (through "./mkdata" and "./mkmap")
4. Run "make distclean"
5. Set CXXFLAGS to "-O2 -g $CXXFLAGS", final release could be compiled without the -g and with -O3 but right now -g -O2 is a reasonable tradeoff between speed and debugability
6. Run "./bootstrap"
7. Run "./configure"; if any problem occurs, well, the release candidate is not ready for release!
8. Run "make"; if any problem occurs, well, the release candidate is *still* not ready for release!
9. Test the resulting binary; if any problem occurs, well, you should fix your code instead of releasing stuff!
10. Run "hg tag RELEASE_NAME", in order to tag the Mercurial so that packagers can fetch this *exact* source tree for this release
11. Run "make dist" to make the .tar.gz
12. Run "fakeroot debian/rules binary" to make the debian package
13. Upload them to Savannah in the folder relating to their version (for example, alpha22 = 0.8.22/).
14. Send a mail to the ml, update web site, savannah news, and rest of the Worlds about the "Good news" ;-)