Release Process and Checklist

Releases are done quarterly, normally on the second non-holiday Monday of January, April, July and October. A feature freeze goes into effect starting 9 days before the release.

Note

This information is only useful if you are a developer of botan who is creating a new release of the library.

Pre Release Testing

Do maintainer-mode builds with Clang and GCC to catch any warnings that should be corrected.

Other checks which are not in CI:

  • Native compile on FreeBSD x86-64

  • Native compile on at least one unusual platform (AIX, NetBSD, …)

  • Build the website content to detect any Doxygen problems

  • Test many build configurations (using src/scripts/test_all_configs.py)

  • Build/test SoftHSM

Confirm that the release notes in news.rst are accurate and complete and that the version number in version.txt is correct.

Tag the Release

Update the release date in the release notes and change the entry for the appropriate branch in readme.rst to point to the new release.

Now check in, and backport changes to the release branch:

$ git commit readme.rst news.rst -m "Update for 3.8.2 release"
$ git checkout release-3
$ git merge master
$ git tag 3.8.2

Build The Release Tarballs

The release script is src/scripts/dist.py and must be run from a git workspace.

$ src/scripts/dist.py 3.8.2

One useful option is --output-dir, which specifies where the output will be placed.

Now do a final build/test of the released tarball.

The --pgp-key-id option is used to specify a PGP keyid. If set, the script assumes that it can execute GnuPG and will attempt to create signatures for the tarballs. The default value is EFBADFBC, which is the official signing key. You can use --pgp-key-id=none to avoid creating any signature, though official distributed releases should not be released without signatures.

The releases served on the official site are taken from the contents in a git repository:

$ git checkout git@botan.randombit.net:/srv/git/botan-releases.git
$ src/scripts/dist.py 3.8.2 --output-dir=botan-releases
$ cd botan-releases
$ sha256sum Botan-3.8.2.tgz >> sha256sums.txt
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Release version 3.8.2"
$ git push origin master

A cron job updates the live site every 10 minutes.

Push to GitHub

Don’t forget to also push tags:

$ git push origin --tags release-3 master

Update The Website

The website content is created by src/scripts/website.py.

The website is mirrored automatically from a git repository which must be updated:

$ git checkout git@botan.randombit.net:/srv/git/botan-website.git
$ ./src/scripts/website.py --output-dir botan-website
$ cd botan-website
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Update for 3.8.2"
$ git push origin master

Announce The Release

Send an email to the botan-announce and botan-devel mailing lists noting that a new release is available.