Making a Release

The following are the steps required to make a release of the Jikes RVM.

  1. "Tag" the release by using admin/bin/makeTag. Use a svn revision number matches one reported by a night-sanity run. i.e. 
    makeTag -rev 422 -tag 2.0.0
  2. Update release number in trunk build.xml (will continue to have "+svn" suffix) and commit change to trunk
  3. Run admin/bin/checkoutReleaseBranch.sh
  4. In release branch, update release number and svn.version property in build.xml to match tagged version and commit change.
  5. Export userguide from confluence, add pdf and html to tree created by checkoutReleaseBranch.sh and commit it.
  6. Generate text release notes from JIRA and put them in NEWS.txt file (TODO: consider switching to HTML format instead).
  7. Generate html release notes from JIRA for use in news articles, sf release notes, etc.
  8. Run admin/bin/makeRelease to create the tar ball.
  9. Use the sf admin GUI to make the release (download creation wizard).
  10. Update the confluence "Releases" page to link to the new download version.
  11. Update JIRA version management to indicate that version has been released.
  12. Update online javadoc.
  13. Send out mail announcements to jikesrvm-announce and jikesrvm-researchers
  14. Also post announcement in SF news and Confluence news.
  15. Also notify people watching the release via the sourceforge gui.