GNOME Software releases are done on the timetable set by the GNOME release schedule.
Maintainers take it in turns to make releases so that the load is spread out evenly.
Adapted from the GNOME release process.
These instructions use the following variables:
new_version
: the version number of the release you are making, for example 3.38.1previous_version
: the version number of the most-recently released version in the same release series, for example 3.38.0branch
: the branch which the release is based on, for example gnome-40 or mainkey_id
: the ID of your GPG key, see the output ofgpg --list-keys
and the note at the end of this file
Go to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/milestones/ and choose the corresponding milestone. Verify all issues and merge requests tagged for this release are complete now. Move those which not to the next milestone or merge pending fixes when possible.
Make sure your repository is up to date and doesn’t contain local changes:
git pull
git status
Check the version in meson.build
is correct for this release.
Download gitlab-changelog and use it to write release entries:
gitlab-changelog.py GNOME/gnome-software ${previous_version}..
Edit this down to just the user visible changes, and list them in
data/metainfo/org.gnome.Software.metainfo.xml.in
. User visible changes are ones
which the average user might be interested to know about, such as a fix for an
impactful bug, a UI change, or a feature change.
You can get review of your metainfo changes from other co-maintainers if you wish.
Generate NEWS
file:
appstreamcli metainfo-to-news ./data/metainfo/org.gnome.Software.metainfo.xml.in ./NEWS
Commit the release:
git add -p
git commit -S -m "Release version ${new_version}"
Build the release tarball:
# Only execute git clean if you don't have anything not tracked by git that you
# want to keep
git clean -dfx
meson setup --prefix $PWD/install -Dbuildtype=release build/
ninja -C build/ dist
Tag, sign and push the release (see below for information about git evtag
):
git evtag sign -u ${key_id} ${new_version}
git push --atomic origin ${branch} ${new_version}
To use a specific key add an option -u ${keyid|email}
after the sign
argument.
Use Tag ${new_version} release
as the tag message.
Post release version bump in meson.build
:
# edit meson.build, then
git commit -a -m "trivial: Post release version bump"
git push
Upload the release tarball:
scp build/meson-dist/gnome-software-${new_version}.tar.xz master.gnome.org:
ssh master.gnome.org ftpadmin install gnome-software-${new_version}.tar.xz
Add the release notes to GitLab and close the milestone:
- Go to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/releases/new?tag_name=${new_version}
- set
Release title
to${new_version}
- set the Milestone of the release, if such exists
- copy the Release notes for the new release from the
NEWS
file (replace~~~~~~~~~~~~
with===
(only three=
)) - in the Links section add:
URL Link title Type https://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-software/${new_major_version}/gnome-software-${new_version}.tar.xz
Release tarball Other https://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-software/${new_major_version}/gnome-software-${new_version}.sha256sum
Release tarball sha256sum Other - save the changes with
Create release
button - verify the added links for the release artifacts work
- set
- Go to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/milestones/ choose the milestone and close it
Releases should be done with git evtag
rather than git tag
, as it provides
stronger security guarantees. See
its documentation for more details.
In particular, it calculates its checksum over all blobs reachable from the tag,
including submodules; and uses a stronger checksum than SHA-1.
You will need a GPG key for this, ideally which has been signed by others so
that it can be verified as being yours. However, even if your GPG key is
unsigned, using git evtag
is still beneficial over using git tag
.