Release Process

Release early, release often. This is a mantra from free software communities. It's accurate. You want to do your design work in the open, and get critical feedback as early as possible.

1. Stages

alpha1
- Alpha is for preview purposes only.
- it is intended to be a technology preview aimed at early adopters, testers, translators
- Do not use alpha releases on production systems!
alpha2
beta1
- Beta releases are appropriate for use with new development. Within beta releases, the features and compatibility should remain consistent. However beta releases may contain numerous and major unaddressed bugs.
beta2
- is available for testers, extension developers, and other people who are curious to follow the development of the next release
rc1
- Release Candidates are believed stable, having passed all internal testing, and with all known fatal runtime bugs fixed. However this release has not been in widespread use long enough to know for sure that all bugs have been identified.
  - wait to declare something RC until code stabilizes and critical bugs are fixed
- feature freeze -> testing and debugging ->
  - This release is ready for widespread testing, and we’re encouraging everyone to download and test the beta releases. Please run the release through your usual routine, and let us know about any bugs or other issues that you find. Remember that this is a beta release, and is not suitable for use on production systems.
- For translators, this is the first call to update the translations to the current set of strings, which should not change much until final.
rc2
final
- also know as Production releases, are stable, having successfully passed through all earlier release stages and believed to be reliable, free of serious bugs, and suitable for use in production systems
- All users are advised to upgrade.
m1
- Maintenance release

2. Issue tracker

update issues in bugtracker
set release date

3. Change Log

Feed Title: Release notes from wackowiki^[link1]

6.2.1^[link2]

4 months ago

Minor feature and bug fix release for 6.2.x series

extend table markup allowing table caption, cell spans, width and cell attributes
- ?| table caption |?
- ^| header | cell ||
- || cell ^ header ||
- ||(attr=value) cell | cell ||
- attributes:
  - align = [center|left|right|justify]
  - bgcolor = [blue|red|green|x11colors]
  - colspan = number
  - id = id_name
  - rowspan = number
  - scope = [row|col|rowgroup|colgroup]
  - valign = [top|middle|bottom]
  - width = number[px|%|em|rem]
allows now [px|%|em|rem] with wrapper_width
change markup syntax for subscript to ,,subscript,,
make sess->date_pattern dependent on $this->user_lang
x11colors.css
- replace .mark-[blue|green|red] with [xblue|xgreen|xred] to not overwrite default definitions in wacko.css
miscellaneous minor fixes
Libs
- PHPMailer 7.0.2

Full Changelog: 6.2.0...6.2.1

4. Release Notes

Upgrade from previous versions
- Component compatibility
- Configuration
Highlights
Call for Localization
- If you can help with languages other than English and German, it would be appreciated.
Testing
- Most Annoying Bugs
  - While many bugs have been eliminated since the last beta, we still have a few remaining (and new) bugs that testers should be aware of:
Themes
Hacks / Patches

5. Build packages

tarball
zip
name the folder within the package according the release
- wacko.r6.0.38
- wacko.r6.2.1
- wacko.r7.0.1

Set back error reporting level in constants.php

const PHP_ERROR_REPORTING			= 0;

Set back error SQL mode to server in config.php

'sql_mode' => '0',

Workflow:

On your local machine (or CI), run:

composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

Create a clean distribution archive that includes everything users need.
Upload the resulting .zip / .tar.gz as an asset to a new GitHub Release.

5.1. Create the Distribution Package

Place the script in your project root folder and run it. Ensure you've installed Composer^[link3].

Basic usage (default):
./build-release.sh --version=6.3.0 - pulls HEAD of master branch
Build from tag:
./build-release.sh --version=6.3.0 --source=6.3.0 - pulls version with 6.3.0 tag
Build from commit hash:
./build-release.sh --version=6.3.1-dev --source=b0061efba26b793a044f0af4bd8611ce92244760 - pulls version with the provided hash

build-release.sh^[link4]

6. Repository

tag the release
branch final release

7. Update Files

Latest development version
Latest released testing version
Latest released stable version

7.1. Update file references

wackowiki-6.2.1.zip^[link5] (2.9 MiB)

Development version
(see Repository^[link6])

Beta version
wackowiki-6.2.2-beta9.zip

8. Release notices and announcements

SF.net file release system's e-mail notices
Announcement -mailing list
SF.net Project news
Draft the new release on GitHub
- https://github.com/WackoWiki/wackowiki/releases
- https://codeberg.org/WackoWiki/wackowiki/releases
Web pages
- https://freshcode.club/projects/wackowiki
Feed
- https://github.com/WackoWiki/wackowiki/releases.atom
- https://codeberg.org/WackoWiki/wackowiki/releases.rss

Links

[link1] https://github.com/WackoWiki/wackowiki/releases
[link2] https://github.com/WackoWiki/wackowiki/releases/tag/6.2.1
[link3] https://wackowiki.org/doc/Org/Tools/Composer
[link4] https://codeberg.org/WackoWiki/wackowiki/src/branch//master/community/devel/build-release.sh
[link5] https://downloads.sourceforge.net/wackowiki/wackowiki-6.2.1.zip
[link6] https://wackowiki.org/doc/Org/Tools/Repository