Documentation Release Process

This page is intended to gather the steps for a release of the GnuCash documentation. It was animated by Bug 652350 - Formalize the Documentation release process and is partial related to the code Release Process.

ATTENTION This is a draft version, cloned from the program's release process and gradually being tailored for the documentation release process

Backport Policy

Check the Subversion#Current_Backport_Policy.

Subversion

• Determine which branch to do the release from:

• If you are about to release a development snapshot, choose trunk
• If you want to release a new stable version and the stable series is already on its own branch, then choose that stable branch, eg. 2.4
• If you want to release a new stable version but the stable series is still on trunk, then choose trunk

• Check out the proper gnucash-docs Subversion branch.
• Verify that the chosen branch can build a distribution tarball, compile, and test it fine:

./autogen.sh
./configure
make distcheck

Fix any errors this step may turn up, commit and check again.

• Update the version number of the [AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE] macro in configure.in
• Commit this change
• Copy the subversion trunk to the tags/<version-number>. For example:

svn cp svn+ssh://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash-docs/trunk svn+ssh://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash-docs/tags/2.4.2 -m "Tag 2.4.2"

Remember to use the proper source branch here!

Checks and Updates

• Check if Authors, Maintainers and Translators from main documents are in sync with
  • the related OMF files (has someone expirience with existing tools for this task?) and
  • AUTHORS
• Check if gnucash/DOCUMENTERS both trunk and stable is in sync with gnucash-docs/AUTHORS.

• Update NEWS (can we adapt some mechanic from gnucashs Changelog updates?)

Source tarballs

• Checkout the release tag from subversion. Do a clean checkout here to avoid packaging unreleased changes ! For example:

svn co svn+ssh://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash-docs/tags/2.4.1 r2.4.1

• Inside r2.4.1, run

./autogen.sh
./configure
make distcheck

This should generate a gzip compressed tarball. (Using "make distcheck" instead of only "make dist" does not only create the tarball, but also runs a complete compilation run on the created tarball, so that missing files are discovered immediately.)

Sourceforge file uploads

The tarball generated above should be uploaded to Source Forge.

• Log in on the [Source Forge GnuCash website]
• Go to the Project Admin -> File Manager section
• Create a new directory for the release under gnucash-docs
• Upload the file created above to this directory.

GnuCash Website

Adding the announcement text

• Go to your GnuCash svn source directory
• cd util/svnlog2ul/
• Run the 'svnlog2ul.sh' utility to get the commit messages relevant to this release. For example:

./svnlog2ul.sh 2.3.9 2.3.10 > 2.3.10-commits.html

Use the output together with a previous news file to generate a newsmessage for this release. The easiest way is probably to copy the old newsfile into a new one, replace all occurrences of the old release number with the new release number and then insert the list of commits.

• Check out subversion htdocs

svn co svn+ssh://svn.gnucash.org/repo/htdocs/trunk/ gnucash-htdocs

• Go to the news files

cd gnucash-htdocs/news

• Copy the last release newsfile. The filename format is usually YYMMDD-<releasenumber>.news. For example:

svn cp 100217-2.3.10.news 100316-2.3.11.news

• Replace the old release numbers in this file. Note that release announcements usually contain two release numbers: the current release and the previous release. Both of them should obviously be replaced. The order to execute the following commands is important ! For example:

sed -i -e 's/2.3.10/2.3.11/g' 100316-2.3.11.news
sed -i -e 's/2.3.9/2.3.10/g' 100316-2.3.11.news

• Now open the file in your favourite editor and replace the changes with the commit messages you had just created. You will have to manually bring some order in the commits (for example, put the commits that fix bugs together in one group, other user visible changes in another group and internal changes in still another one)

Updating the release number for the download pointers

Next, the release number should be added to the website configuration script. This ensures all download links are appropriately updated.

• Edit the file gnucash-htdocs/externals/global_params.php. The first few lines in this script set various release numbers: latest_stable, latest_unstable and variants thereof on Windows and MacOS X. Adapt these parameters as needed.

Finally, all these changes to the website should be committed.

svn ci -m "Update to release x.y.z"

The commit will take care of updating the live website.

Mailing list announcement

Send the same announcement to the following lists:

• gnucash-devel@gnucash.org
• gnucash-user@gnucash.org
• gnucash-announce@gnucash.org

To do so, you have to be subscribed to the mailing lists. Then I found it easiest to copy the release announcement from my web browser into a new mail message (Kmail). In kmail this converts the html in a reasonably clean plain-text message. Some further minor cleanup may be necessary.

Bugzilla

Add the new version number.