Releasing

To make a release of Weston, follow these steps.

0. Verify the test suites and codebase checks pass. All of the tests should either pass or skip.

   ninja -C build/ test

1. Verify that the wayland and wayland-protocols version dependencies are correct, and that wayland-protocols has had a release with any needed protocol updates.

2. Update the first stanza of meson.build to the intended version.

   If the ABI has been broken, make sure libweston_major has been bumped since the last release.

   Then commit your changes:

   RELEASE_NUMBER="x.y.z"
   RELEASE_NAME="[alpha|beta|RC1|RC2|official|point]"
   git status
   git commit meson.build -m "build: bump to version $RELEASE_NUMBER for the $RELEASE_NAME release"
   git push

3. Run the release.sh script to generate the tarballs, sign and upload them, and generate a release announcement template. This script can be obtained from X.org's modular package:

   https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/util/modular/blob/master/release.sh

   The script supports a --dry-run option to test it without actually doing a release. If the script fails on the distcheck step due to a test suite error that can't be fixed for some reason, you can skip testsuite by specifying the --dist argument. Pass --help to see other supported options.

   release.sh .

4. Compose the release announcements. The script will generate *.x.y.z.announce files with a list of changes and tags. Prepend these with a human-readable listing of the most notable changes. For x.y.0 releases, indicate the schedule for the x.y+1.0 release.

5. PGP sign the release announcement and send it to wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org.

6. Update releases.html in wayland.freedesktop.org with links to tarballs and the release email URL. Copy tarballs produced by release.sh to releases/.

   Once satisfied:

   git commit -am "releases: add ${RELEASE_NUMBER} release"
   git push

For x.y.0 releases, also create the release series x.y branch. The x.y branch is for bug fixes and conservative changes to the x.y.0 release, and is where we create x.y.z releases from. Creating the x.y branch opens up master for new development and lets new development move on. We've done this both after the x.y.0 release (to focus development on bug fixing for the x.y.1 release for a little longer) or before the x.y.0 release (like we did with the 1.5.0 release, to unblock master development early).

git branch x.y [sha]
git push origin x.y

The master branch's meson.build version should always be (at least) x.y.90, with x.y being the most recent stable branch. The stable branch's meson.build version is just whatever was most recently released from that branch.

For stable branches, we commit fixes to master first, then git cherry-pick -x them back to the stable branch.