tor/doc/HACKING/ReleasingTor.md

Putting out a new release

Here are the steps Roger takes when putting out a new Tor release:

1. Use it for a while, as a client, as a relay, as a hidden service, and as a directory authority. See if it has any obvious bugs, and resolve those.

   As applicable, merge the maint-X branch into the release-X branch.

2. Gather the changes/* files into a changelog entry, rewriting many of them and reordering to focus on what users and funders would find interesting and understandable.

   1. Make sure that everything that wants a bug number has one. Make sure that everything which is a bugfix says what version it was a bugfix on.

   2. Concatenate them.

   3. Sort them by section. Within each section, sort by "version it's a bugfix on", else by numerical ticket order.

   4. Clean them up:

      Standard idioms: Fixes bug 9999; bugfix on 0.3.3.3-alpha.

      One space after a period.

      Make stuff very terse

      Make sure each section name ends with a colon

      Describe the user-visible problem right away

      Mention relevant config options by name. If they're rare or unusual, remind people what they're for

      Avoid starting lines with open-paren

      Present and imperative tense: not past.

      'Relays', not 'servers' or 'nodes' or 'Tor relays'.

      "Stop FOOing", not "Fix a bug where we would FOO".

      Try not to let any given section be longer than about a page. Break up long sections into subsections by some sort of common subtopic. This guideline is especially important when organizing Release Notes for new stable releases.

      If a given changes stanza showed up in a different release (e.g. maint-0.2.1), be sure to make the stanzas identical (so people can distinguish if these are the same change).

   5. Merge them in.

   6. Clean everything one last time.

   7. Run ./scripts/maint/format_changelog.py to make it prettier.

3. Compose a short release blurb to highlight the user-facing changes. Insert said release blurb into the ChangeLog stanza. If it's a stable release, add it to the ReleaseNotes file too. If we're adding to a release-0.2.x branch, manually commit the changelogs to the later git branches too.

   If you're doing the first stable release in a series, you need to create a ReleaseNotes for the series as a whole. To get started there, copy all of the Changelog entries from the series into a new file, and run ./scripts/maint/sortChanges.py on it. That will group them by category. Then kill every bugfix entry for fixing bugs that were introduced within that release series; those aren't relevant changes since the last series. At that point, it's time to start sorting and condensing entries. (Generally, we don't edit the text of existing entries, though.)

4. In maint-0.2.x, bump the version number in configure.ac and run scripts/maint/updateVersions.pl to update version numbers in other places, and commit. Then merge maint-0.2.x into release-0.2.x.

   (NOTE: To bump the version number, edit configure.ac, and then run either make, or perl scripts/maint/updateVersions.pl, depending on your version.)

5. Make dist, put the tarball up somewhere, and tell #tor about it. Wait a while to see if anybody has problems building it. Try to get Sebastian or somebody to try building it on Windows.

6. Get at least two of weasel/arma/Sebastian to put the new version number in their approved versions list.

7. Sign the tarball, then sign and push the git tag:

    gpg -ba <the_tarball>
    git tag -u <keyid> tor-0.2.x.y-status
    git push origin tag tor-0.2.x.y-status
   

8. scp the tarball and its sig to the dist website, i.e. /srv/dist-master.torproject.org/htdocs/ on dist-master. When you want it to go live, you run "static-update-component dist.torproject.org" on dist-master.

   Edit include/versions.wmi and Makefile to note the new version.

9. Email the packagers (cc'ing tor-assistants) that a new tarball is up. The current list of packagers is:

   - {weasel,gk,mikeperry} at torproject dot org
   - {blueness} at gentoo dot org
   - {paul} at invizbox dot io
   - {ondrej.mikle} at gmail dot com
   - {lfleischer} at archlinux dot org
   - {tails-dev} at boum dot org
   

10. Add the version number to Trac. To do this, go to Trac, log in, select "Admin" near the top of the screen, then select "Versions" from the menu on the left. At the right, there will be an "Add version" box. By convention, we enter the version in the form "Tor: 0.2.2.23-alpha" (or whatever the version is), and we select the date as the date in the ChangeLog.

11. Forward-port the ChangeLog.

12. Wait up to a day or two (for a development release), or until most packages are up (for a stable release), and mail the release blurb and changelog to tor-talk or tor-announce.

(We might be moving to faster announcements, but don't announce until the website is at least updated.)

13. If it's a stable release, bump the version number in the maint-x.y.z branch to "newversion-dev", and do a merge -s ours merge to avoid taking that change into master. Do a similar merge -s theirs merge to get the change (and only that change) into release. (Some of the build scripts require that maint merge cleanly into release.)