Release Process

Each GnuCash release involves a number of steps for the release manager. This page is intended to gather these steps.

Subversion

• Check out subversion trunk.
• Update the version number in configure.in (part of the [AC_INIT] macro)
• Commit this change in subversion
• Copy the subversion trunk to the tags/<version-number>. For example:

svn cp svn+ssh://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk svn+ssh://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/tags/2.3.10 -m "Tag 2.3.10"

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/tags/2.3.10 r2.3.10

• Run Autogen.sh, followed by make dist

This should generate two tarballs, one bzip2 compressed and one gzip compressed.

Windows Executable

The creation of the svn tag in the first section will automatically trigger the build for the Windows Executable in the next nightly build. The resulting executable can be downloaded the day after from [[1]]

Mac OS X Executable

This executable is currently created by John Ralls.

Sourceforge file uploads

All the above build targets 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, either under gnucash (stable) or gnucash (unstable)
• Upload the files created above to this directory.
• If this release is the latest stable release, mark these files as the default download targets for their respective platforms (.exe file on Windows, .dmg file on Mac OS X, source tarball on all other targets).

GnuCash Website announcement

• 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)

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.