2019-08-24

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
        and pointer to the GitLab milestone
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:

* set :new :yes on any new backend .desc files, by looking for added files:

  version=1.0.27
  git ls-files -- backend | while read f; do
    git log --follow --diff-filter=A --find-renames=40% \
            --format="%ai  $f" $version..HEAD -- "$f"
  done | cat

* NEWS: update and enter date of release, etc
  Get list of heavily change backends via: git diff --stat $version..HEAD
  Get list of details from: git log $version..HEAD
* git commit -a
* git push origin master

Making the release:

* temporarily set a PRIVATE_TOKEN variable in the GitLab CI/CD
  variables.  You have to create one in your own Settings > Access
  Tokens.  Set it to expire the next day to avoid abuse.  Better yet,
  remove it from the CI/CD variables when the job is finished.
* git tag -a -s 1.0.28 -m Release
* git push --tags origin master
* trigger the manual 'release' stage of the build via the web UI when
  this becomes possible.  This requires a valid PRIVATE_TOKEN.

Updating the website and announcing the release:

* checkout the sane/website.git 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 (make -C doc html-pages)
* [TBD] use man2html from http://hydra.nac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/man2html.html
  to rebuild html man pages (make -C doc html-man) (no other version works)
* update announcement to index.html
* git commit -a && git push
* check that website's pipeline succeeded
* announce release on sane-announce mailing list (and Cc: sane-devel).
  Ping the sane-announce list's moderator (m. allan noah) to get your
  post approved ASAP.

After the release:

* remove the ':new' tag from all doc/descriptions*/*.desc files
* git add new and changed files and commit
* git push