Emacs release procedure (Was: [h-e-w] Current word on binaries)

[Eli Zaretskii]

Here's a message sent in the past by Gerd Moellmann in which he
summarized the procedure he used for making a pretest/release
tarballs.  Note that the specific versions and tags mentioned may need
to be revised/modified for each specific release.

Francesco, if you have any comments based on your experience of
releasing v21.3, please do.

One issue I remember from my experience is that there are directories
present in the checked-out branch, such as lispref, which should not
be in the tarball.  They are there because they are present on the
trunk and because the RC branch tag exists on those directories as
well.  The solution is either to remove the directories in your local
sandbox, or (better) remove the branch tags from the files that are
not supposed to exist on the branch, and use "cvs update -P" to let
CVS prune empty directories when the tree is checked out.

I'm cc'ing emacs-devel so that this procedure is archived and could
be useful to future release managers.  I started a new thread for the
same reason.

------- Start of forwarded message -------
Subject: CVS tags
Reply-To: address@hidden
From: address@hidden (Gerd Moellmann)
Date: 24 Mar 2002 20:42:06 +0100
X-Sender: address@hidden
X-Status: A

I see in the change logs that 21.2 has been released.

Since there is no CVS tag for it, I wonder if I ever told that I did
tag the releases and pretests to facilitate diffing etc., or if I did
tell how I built the releases and pretests.  In case it's useful,
below is the exact procedure I followed.

1. cvs update

2. Run admin/build-configs to make sure Emacs builds in a number of
   frequently used configurations.  Fix bugs.

3. Bootstrap to make 100% sure all elc files are up-to-date, and to
   make sure that the later tagged version will bootstrap, should it
   be necessary to check it out.

4. Commit loaddefs.el, cus-load.el, finder-inf.el.

5. Run autoconf, commit configure.

5a. For a release, add released change log entries, and set the
   version number (M-x load-file RET admin/admin.el RET, then
   M-x add-release-logs RET, and M-x set-version RET).

6. make-dist --snapshot.  Check the contents of the new tar with 
   admin/diff-tar-files against an older tar file.

7. Make xdeltas

8. Untar the tar files made in 6, configure, build, install, saving
   the output of these phases with the script command.  Check the
   output, esp. check that Info files aren't built.  (Saving 
   the output of the last release diffing helps spotting problems.)

9. `cvs tag EMACS_PRETEST_21_0_105' in the toplevel Emacs dir.
   (I used `EMACS_21_1' for the release tag.)

10. Increment version numbers in versions.el, README, emacs.texi.
  (See 5a).

11. Upload & announce.
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