Release Process

Each GnuCash release involves a number of steps for the release manager. This page is intended to gather these steps for the program, while the Documentation Release Process is separated.

Backport Policy

Check the Subversion#Current_Backport_Policy.

Git Based Release

These steps detail how to perform a GnuCash release from a GnuCash git repository. This is only possible from 2.5.2 and up. For older releases check out the #Svn Based Release steps below.

Notes

• While writing this svn is still the canonical repository for the GnuCash code. This affects the way releases are tagged. So even though we start from a git repo the full release process requires a few svn related commands to be executed. These are marked with SVN-MASTER in the process description below. Once we fully switch to a git primary repository these commands will be replaced with equivalent git commands. For reference these are already added in the process below, prefixed with GIT-MASTER. These should not be used yet ! We expect to switch the primary repositories to git around the time we will release GnuCash 2.6.
• Where relevant, the process below assumes that the primary git repository is configured as a remote called "upstream". If you have configured it under another name, please adapt the commands below accordingly.
• Svn and git use a different default branch. If svn is the primary repository the default branch is trunk. If git is the primary repository the default branch is master. The commands below will reflect this.

Git

• Check out Git trunk.
• Verify that current trunk can build a distribution tarball, compile, and test it fine:

make distcheck

In this step, some files might have been changed such as POTFILES.in, which can then be committed before actually incrementing the version number. However, some of the test data files might also have been changed due to "make check", but those changes should not be committed.

• Update the version number of the [AC_INIT] macro in configure.ac
• Run

  util/gitlog2ul.sh <previous release> > release.News

and summarize significant changes in a release summary in NEWS.

• If this is the first release of a calendar year, copy ChangeLog to ChangeLog.YYYY with YYYY being the previous year.
• Find the rule in Makefile.am to generate the ChangeLog, update the "--since" parameter to the start of the current year.
• Run make, which should update the ChangeLog file now.
• If you are building out of tree, copy the updated ChangeLog from your build directory to your source directory.
• Commit changes to NEWS and the ChangeLogs to the git repository. Don't forget to add the new ChangeLogs first if it's the start of a new year.
• Push all your changes to upstream:

SVN-MASTER

git svn dcommit

'GIT-MASTER

git push upstream master:master

• Tag the new release.

SVN-MASTER This is done by copying trunk to tags/<version-number> in the subversion repository. For example:

svn cp svn+ssh://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk svn+ssh://svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/tags/2.5.2 -m "Tag 2.5.2"

GIT-MASTER For example:

git tag 2.5.2 -m "Tag 2.5.2"
git push upstream --tags

FIXME Does git tagging require more options ?

• SVN-MASTER Get the latest tag in your local git repository:

 git checkout trunk
 git update
 git fetch -t

Source tarballs

• Checkout the release tag from git. Clone your git repo here to avoid packaging unreleased changes ! For example:

git clone <your-local-up-to-date-git-repo> r2.5.2
cd r2.5.2
git checkout 2.5.2

• Inside r2.5.2, run

./autogen.sh
./configure
make distcheck

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

Svn Based Release

Prior to GnuCash 2.5.2 all releases were done starting from the svn repository. This uses slightly different commands than the git repository based release.

Subversion

• Check out Subversion trunk.
• Verify that current trunk can build a distribution tarball, compile, and test it fine:

make distcheck

In this step, some files might have been changed such as POTFILES.in, which can then be committed before actually incrementing the version number. However, some of the test data files might also have been changed due to "make check", but those changes should not be committed.

• Update the version number of the [AC_INIT] macro in configure.ac
• If this is the first release of a calendar year:

• copy ChangeLog to ChangeLog.YYYY with YYYY being the previous year.
• Find the rule in Makefile.am to generate the ChangeLog, update the "-r" parameter for the svn log command to range from 'HEAD:<first-commit-of-this-year>'. You could look up the revision number of that first commit and use that (old way), or you can set this range to 'HEAD:{<start-of-year-date>}' like for example 'HEAD:{2013-01-01}'. The last option is simpler at the cost of one revision too much in the log file.

• Run

  util/svnlog2ul/svnlog2ul.sh <previous release> > release.News

and summarize significant changes in a release summary in NEWS.

• Run make, which should update the ChangeLog file now.
• If you are building out of tree, copy the updated ChangeLog from your build directory to your source directory.
• Commit changes to NEWS and the ChangeLogs to the subversion repository. Don't forget to add the new ChangeLogs first if it's the start of a new year.
• 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

• Inside r2.3.10, run

./autogen.sh
./configure
make distcheck

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

Windows Executable

The creation of the 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 http://code.gnucash.org/builds/win32

Mac OS X Executable

This package is usually created by John Ralls using this procedure .

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

Note that gnucash-htdocs is a pure git repository. In order to update the website you will hence have to follow the instructions on our Git wiki page to prepare a local gnucash-htdocs repository with commit access to the primary repository on code.gnucash.org. Be sure to follow the committer instructions for pure git repositories on that page !

Adding the announcement text

• Go to your GnuCash git source directory
• Run the 'gitlog2ul.sh' utility to get the commit messages relevant to this release. For example:

./util/gitlog2ul.sh 2.5.1 2.5.2 > 2.5.2-commits.html

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

• Go to your gnucash-htdocs git directory
• Checkout the master branch and make sure it's up to date

cd gnucash-htdocs.git
git checkout master
git pull upstream

• Go to the news files

cd news

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

cp 130430-2.5.1.news 130527-2.5.2.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/2.5.1/2.5.2/g' 130527-2.5.2.news
sed -i -e 's/2.5.0/2.5.1/g' 130527-2.5.2.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)
• Add the new file to revision control

git add 130527-2.5.2.news

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. From the base directory:

git add <changed-files>
git commit -m "Update to release x.y.z"
git push upstream master:master

The last command 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

After logging in

• Add the new version number and eventually
• add the next milestone.