[parted-devel] Release procedure

[Jim Meyering]

"David Olsson" <dolsson5 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Does this team have a documented release procedure?

I don't know.

> I sketched one on the wiki at
> http://parted.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/ReleaseProcedure, or
> see below.  Please correct, add, or subtract, or say we don't need this.  My
> idea is that any documentation pertaining to parted development or use in
> general should be in the tree.  Anything specific to this team might better
> belong in the wiki.  Thoughts?  Feel free to change the wiki page or respond
> here for discussion.  Thanks.  Hope I'm not being presumptuous.  Good word,
> that: presumptuous.
>
> ~David O.
>
> ReleaseProcedure:

Documenting the procedure is important.
I hope we can automate a whole lot of this.

> = How To Release a New Parted =
>
> Pay attention to these items during development, then check them off at
> release time.
>
> * Update regression tests.

Isn't this more something that'd be done mainly during development?
Otherwise, (doing it at release time) it's too easy to introduce tests
that are not as portable as they should be.

> * Run regression tests.

This is a must, but it is also something that should be done frequently
during development.  Ideally, via an automated procedure, a la buildbot,
so that when a new problem arises it is detected as soon as possible.

> * Test platforms (see manual).
> * Write release notes.
> * Update copyright dates.

For GNU projects, long-standing practice is to update copyright dates only
as files are changed, and not en-masse at release time.  If you use emacs,
put this in your ~/.emacs file:

  (add-hook 'before-save-hook 'copyright-update)

The only exception is to update the date in --version output (if needed)
to include the current year, and that can/should be automated.  Hmm.. I
see that parted --version doesn't include copyright information.
I'll fix that shortly, once gnulib things are integrated.

> * Update manual (including copyright, history, and index).
> * Update other docs, see PartedDocumentation.
> * Copy to repositories and update info there.

For coreutils, I use two scripts:
   announce-gen: to generate most of the message to be sent to the mailing list
   gnupload: to sign and upload .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .xdelta to
     the GNU ftp server (stable releases go to ftp.gnu.org, others
     to alpha.gnu.org)

It'll be trivial to pull both of those from gnulib, and integrate them
into Makefile.am rules -- if no one objects, I'll do that, too.

>  * GNU project pages
>  * freshmeat project page
>  * ?