2009-05-05

This text summarizes some points to pay attention to when a new release
of sane-backends is planned.

Timetable (approximate periods):

Day  0: Announcement of upcoming release on sane-devel including timetable
Day 14: Feature freeze (only bugfixes + documentation updates)
Day 28: Code freeze (only fixes for bugs that can destroy hardware, can cause 
        compilation problems or render a backend completely unusable, and
        documentation updates are allowed)
Day 35: Release

Before the release:

* Make sure that config.guess and config.sub are up-to-date (get them from
  savannah.gnu.org/projects/config)
* configure.in: increase version number
* configure.in: remove 'cvs' from textual version number
* configure.in: set is_release=yes
* OPTIONAL: aclocal.m4: recreate by running aclocal
* OPTIONAL: include/sane/config.h.in: recreate (autoheader in root of checkout)
* DONT run automake, it will overwrite our custom ltmain.sh
* configure: recreate by running autoconf
* NEWS: update and enter date of release
* sane-backends.lsm: update
* ChangeLog: set release marker
* cvs commit
* tag git with release tag; e.g.: 'git tag -a RELEASE_1_0_15'

Making the release:

* make tar.gz, sane-backends-x.y.z.lsm, and .md5sum with "make sane-backends"
* unpack tar.gz in temporary directory
* make diff from last release by unpacking it also in temporary directory
  and running e.g. 
  diff -uNr sane-backends-1.0.14 sane-backends-1.0.15  > sane-backends-1.0.14-1.0.15.diff
* check that the diff applies cleanly to the old version
* gzip the diff
* install devel headers required to build optional backends (1284,gphoto,etc)
* check that the new version .tar.gz can be compiled
* upload these files together with the .diff.gz to the FTP/HTTP servers
  (at the moment: alioth.debian.org, ftp files are in
  /srv/alioth.debian.org/chroot/ftproot/pub/sane/ )

Announcing the release:

* checkout the html module and:
* copy sane-backends.html to sane-backends-"old-version".html
* update sane-supported-devices.html with link to above "old" file
* rebuild sane-backends.html and sane-mfgs.html (see doc/Makefile)
* use man2htmlfrom http://hydra.nac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/man2html.html
  to rebuild html man pages (see doc/Makefile) (no other version works)
* add md5 sum to sane-md5sum.txt
* check and update platforms page (sane-support.html)
* write announcements on sane-project.org and sane-devel, maybe others
  (e.g. freshmeat), include the md5 hash

After the release:

* move ChangeLog to ChangeLog-"version" and start a new ChangeLog
* add ChangeLog-"version" to EXTRA_DIST in Makefile.in
* configure.in: bump version and V_REV
* configure.in: add cvs suffix to textual version
* configure.in: set is_release=no
* configure: regenerate with autoconf
* remove the ':new' tag from any new backends .desc files
* commit
* on cvs.alioth.debian.org, cvs update, ./configure, make the cvs checkout in
  /org/alioth.debian.org/chroot/home/groups/sane/sane-backends-lists-cvs/