HOWTO-RELEASE: Notes on releasing. 0. Make sure that you have current FSF releases of autoconf, automake, and libtool packages installed under a common installation prefix and that these tools are in your executable search path prior to any other installed versions. Versions delivered with Linux may be altered so it is best to install official FSF releases. GNU 'm4' 1.4.16 is needed in order to avoid bugs in m4. These packages may be downloaded from the following ftp locations: m4 - ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/m4 autoconf - ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/autoconf automake - ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/automake libtool - ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libtool It is recommanded building m4 before autoconf, since the latest requires the former. Release builds should only be done on a system with a functioning and correctly set system clock and on a filesystem which accurately records file update times. Use of GNU make is recommended. 1. Commit any unsaved changes. 2. Create html/vX.X.html. Take ChangeLog entries and html-ify in there. Easist thing to do is take html/vX.(X-1).html and use it as a template. Add that file to the list of EXTRA_DIST files in the html/Makefile.am. 3. Update html/index.html to refer to this new page as the current release. 4. Increment the release version in configure.ac. Put 'alpha' or 'beta' after the version, if applicable. For example: 4.0.0 or 4.0.0beta7 Version should be updated in two places: in the second argument of the AC_INIT macro and in LIBTIFF_xxx_VERSION variables. 5. Update library ELF versioning in configure.ac (LIBTIFF_CURRENT, LIBTIFF_REVISION, and LIBTIFF_AGE). These numbers have nothing to do with the libtiff release version numbers. Note that as of libtiff 4.X, proper ELF versioning is used so please follow the rules listed in configure.ac. At a bare minimum, you should increment LIBTIFF_REVISION for each release so that installed library files don't overwrite existing files. If APIs have been added, removed, or interface structures have changed, then more care is required. 6. Add an entry to Changelog similar to: * libtiff 4.0.0 released. 7. In the source tree do ./autogen.sh This step may be skipped if you have already been using a maintainer build with current autoconf, automake, and libtool packages. It is only needed when updating tool versions. 8. It is recommended (but not required) to build outside of the source tree so that the source tree is kept in a pristine state. This also allows sharing the source directory on several networked systems. For example: mkdir libtiff-build cd libtiff-build /path/to/libtiff/configure --enable-maintainer-mode otherwise do ./configure --enable-maintainer-mode 9. In the build tree do make release This will update "RELEASE-DATE", "VERSION", and libtiff/tiffvers.h in the source tree. 10. In the source tree, verify that the version info in RELEASE-DATE, VERSION and libtiff/tiffvers.h is right. 11. In the build tree do make make distcheck If 'make distcheck' fails, then correct any issues until it succeeds. Two files with names tiff-version.tar.gz and tiff-version.zip will be created in the top level build directory. 12. In the source tree do 'cvs commit'. 13. In the source tree do cvs tag Release-v4-0-0 (or the appropriate name for the release) 14. Copy release packages from the build tree to the ftp.remotesensing.org ftp site. scp tiff-*.tar.gz tiff-*.zip \ warmerdam@upload.osgeo.org:/osgeo/download/libtiff 15. Announce to list, tiff@lists.maptools.org