Automatic Tarball Creation

Requirements

The tarball for a Geeklog release is created automatically and also added to the File Management submission queue on www.geeklog.net. In order to perform a Geeklog release, you need

• commit permission to the Geeklog repository (to tag the release)
• access to the File Management submission queue (to actually publish the tarball)
• a Geeklog release should be accompanied by an announcement on www.geeklog.net, so you also need to be able to publish a story (or submit one and ask someone with moderator access to publish it)

Details

Tagging

The convention is that all actual Geeklog releases (beta, release candidate, security release, or "normal" release) are tagged with a tag that starts with geeklog_, followed by the version number (where dots are replaced by underscores) and an appendix ('b' + number for betas, 'rc' + number for release candidates, 'sr' + number for security releases, or '_stable' for the final release).

It is important to stick to these naming conventions! Tags that start with "geeklog" should be considered reserved. Feel free to tag any revision that somehow marks an important point in Geeklog development, but unless it is a release version, its tag should not start with "geeklog".

The script that creates the tarball may fail if the version number part of the tag isn't correct. So while - from a user's point of view - this is mostly a convention, getting the version number right is also important for the process to succeed.

Tarball Creation

The geeklog-release job in Jenkins will run every 15 minutes. It checks for new tags. When a new tag is found and that tag starts with geeklog_, it will start the creation of the tarball.

The actual steps to perform are part of the Jenkins job but follow those in the mkdist.sh script from the tools repository:

• check out the tagged version
• remove any files and directories that shouldn't be in the tarball
• add the PEAR classes
• figure out what the previous release was and create the changed-files list of files that changed since that previous release
• create tarball

Publishing

After the tarball has been created, it is automatically copied over from the project server to the server that hosts the Geeklog website. It is also added to the File Management's submission queue.

The description of that file contains the correct version number, file size, and md5 checksum. When approving this submission, make sure to update the file's description with a short text describing what the release is about (e.g. a beta) or what the most important new features are.