Before you start with this, make sure you understand the release model all developers should follow for core components.
That prevents mistakes and helps to get a clean build (by building in a container). It will catch all translation updates and pre-write a NEWS file for you by using the commit messages. Best use it over the manual release process when possible.
Install 'xfce4-dev-tools' to make use of it !
Stable releases are created from the stable branch of the repository. So before you start make sure you are working in this branch.
# get the stable branch git checkout --track -b xfce-4.14 remotes/origin/xfce-4.14 # pull the latest changes git pull --rebase
Now make sure all the bug fixes are committed and pushed to the remote repository. You can check this at gitlab.xfce.org as well.
For the version number the micro version is increased by 1. So 4.12.2 becomes 4.12.3.
Unstable releases are created from the master branch, which is in this period in feature-freeze. There we use an odd minor number. So the first development release is for example 4.15.0, then 4.15.1 etc.
If you are sure all the fixes are committed in the correct branch, its time to prepare the release.
As of Xfce version 4.15.0, xfce-dev-tools contains several Bash helper scripts to assist in building your release:
./autogen.sh --enable-gtk-doc make distcheck
If everything is ok distcheck will tell you the abc.x.y.z.tar.bz2
tarball is ready. If not fix the error(s) and commit the changes before running distcheck again.
If the tarball is build successfully, it is time to tag the release in git.
# make sure there are not pending changes git status # if not, commit them git commit -a -m "Updates for the x.y.z release." && git push # tag the release (annotated tag is required) git tag -a abc.x.y.z # send tag to remote git push --tags
For more information read the git tag manual.
Release New Version
link next to your project.sha1sum abc.x.y.z.tar.bz2
in a terminal.NEWS
file.git
back to ?_version_tag() in the configure.am.in
file, commit and push the change.master
branch.