Preface

This document is part of the Campcaster project, Copyright © 2004 Media Development Loan Fund, under the GNU GPL.

Scope

This document describes the process of releasing a new version of Campcaster. Obviously this document is only relevant to people who have the rights and permissions to make such a release.

Introduction

For all the releases of Campcaster to remain consistent, it is preferable to have a repeatable release process, which will be followed when creating releases. This ensures that no matter who creates the releases, they will remain similar.

The release process boils down to the following steps:

Getting Campcaster sources

It is assumed that the person doing the release has a read/write access to the Campcaster version control system. As a first step of the release process, a fresh copy of the version control repository is exported, so as to insure that:
To get a fresh copy of the Campcaster repository, execute the following in an empty directory: 
svn export svn://code.campware.org/campcaster/trunk/campcaster

Checking the distribution script

It is advisable to check the installation script bin/dist.sh, to make sure it refers to up-to-date information from the development environment.

The most important aspect to check is that the specific versions of tools mentioned in the distribution script are in sync with the tools compiled by the master Makefile under the target tools_setup. To check this, compare tool version variables in the two files, e.g. BOOST_VERSION from Makefile with boost_version from bin/dist.sh. Make sure to check the versions for all the tools mentioned in these files. Also check that there are no tools missing from the distribution script that are mentioned in the master Makefile.

Updating release version and changelog

Updating the release version and maintining a changelog helps people track the progress of the project. Also, building binary packages rely on this information, in particular debian packages won't build if there is a mismatch between the release version and the topmost entry in the debian changelog file.

You need to update the version information in the following files: To update the changelog, edit etc/debian/changelog, by inserting a section onto the top of the file:

campcaster (<version>-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * Changes listed here

 -- Package Maintainer <maintainer@foo.bar>  <timestamp>

The timestamp above must be preceeded by two spaces, and must be an RFC 2822 compliant date string, which is most easily produced by issuing the date -R command. Please note that the debian package manager is quite picky on the format of the changelog file. See section 4.4 of the Debian Policy Manual for more details.

Don't forget to commit the changes made to the changelog into Subversion before proceeding.

Creating release tarballs

To create the release tarballs, invoke the distribution script bin/dist.sh, with the release version as its single parameter:

./bin/dist.sh --version <version>

This will create two tarballs in the parent of the current directory:

Testing the tarballs

Having broken releases is very annoying, thus it is highly recommended that the release tarballs are tested on a plain vanilla system. To test the tarballs, follow the procedure described in the Campcaster installation document.

Do not publish tarballs that have not been tested, or are known to be broken.

Creating Debian packages

After the source tarballs have been tested, Debian source and binary packages can be created. To do so, upload the source tarballs to a Debian system, install the packages needed to install Campcaster, plus two more needed for the build process: debhelper and fakeroot. Then do the following:

tar xfj campcaster-<version>.tar.bz2
tar xfj campcaster-libraries-<version>.tar.bz2
cd campcaster-<version>
./bin/createDebianPackages.sh -d .. -v <version> -o .. \
                -m "Package Maintainer <maintainer@foo.bar>"
cd ..

The above command will create the Debain source package files next to the original source tarballs. The script will generate the following files, making up the Debian source package:

campcaster_<version>-1.dsc
campcaster_<version>-1.diff.gz
campcaster_<version>.orig.tar.gz
Based on the source packages, the Debian package management system can build the binaries for the current target platform, provided all the necessary packages required to build are installed on the system. For a list of the necessary packages, please consult the debian/control file in extracted debianized source tree generated below.
Building is best done in an empty directory as follows:

rm -rf /opt/campcaster
rm -rf debian_build
mkdir debian_build
cd debian_build
dpkg-source -x ../campcaster_<ls_version>-1.dsc
cd campcaster-<version>
sudo dpkg-buildpackage
cd ../..
The above commands will result in the following debian packages: 
campcaster-libs_<version>-1_<arch>.deb
campcaster-station_<version>-1_<arch>.deb
campcaster-studio_<version>-1_<arch>.deb

Uploading the packages to the Campware repository

For users to be able to install the packages using apt-get or Synaptic etc., they need to be uploaded to the Campware package repository on code.campware.org. To do this, you need to do the following, as real root (sudo is not enough):

Tagging the sources

After the tarballs have been tested, the release can be finalized. As a first step, the current state of the Campcaster version control repository has to be tagged, so that the the very versions in the release can be retrieved at any later date. To tag the repository, issue the following command:

svn copy svn://code.campware.org/campcaster/trunk \
         svn://code.campware.org/campcaster/tags/campcaster-<version>

This will tag the current state of the repository with the tag campcaster-<version>, enabling later retrieval of this specific state.

Updating Trac

Add the new version number to the Version pull-down menu in Trac by executing 
trac-admin /usr/local/trac-projects/campcaster version add <version>
on code.campware.org.

Publishing the tarballs

To make the release available to the public, the created tarballs have to be published. This is done by making the files accessible under the Campcaster project page on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/campcaster. Currently, only MDLF support staff have access to publish into this space, so after creating the tarballs, one should contact them personally to publish the files.

Announcing the release

For the public to be aware of the new release, it has to be announced. This is primarily done on the Campware site, but also on other meta-sites, like freshmeat. In particular, the following announcements are made: