Making a New wxWidgets Release

Creating a new release requires a few things before getting started:

Linux or OSX.
Windows 7+ with HTML Help Workshop, and Inno Setup installed.
7-Zip, Doxygen 1.8.8, and GraphViz installed on both machines.

Unless mentioned otherwise, all steps should be run on Linux or OSX so that the repository export used for the release is primarily using LF line endings. Files that require CRLF line endings will be converted appropriately.

Important: Ensure that 7-Zip, HTML Help Workshop, Doxygen, GraphViz and Inno Setup have all been added to your Path in Windows. You can confirm this by running 7z, hhc, iscc, doxygen -v, and dot -V in a command prompt. Add the missing installed folder locations of any executables to your Path.

Pre-Release Steps

Update docs/readme.txt. Please review its contents in addition to just changing the version number.
Update docs/release.md (the release sha1sums should be set to zeroes).
Put a date on the release line in docs/changes.txt.
Update the date in the manual (docs/doxygen/mainpages/manual.h).
Update the release announcement post in docs/publicity/announce.txt.

Commit the changes and finally tag the release, preferably GPG-signed:

git tag -s -m 'Tag X.Y.Z release' vX.Y.Z

and otherwise unsigned:

git tag -m 'Tag X.Y.Z release' vX.Y.Z

Don't overwrite existing tags. For non-final releases use e.g. X.Y.Z-rc1 instead of X.Y.Z.

Creating Release Files

The release scripts can be run from any working directory, and they will generate all release package files under distrib/release/x.y.z. The scripts mostly build the release packages based on the current HEAD commit, so always ensure you have the appropriate tag or commit checked out.

Run ./build/tools/release.sh x.y.z to create source archives wxWidgets-x.y.z.{7z,tar.bz2,zip}, wxWidgets-x.y.z-headers.7z, and wxWidgets-x.y.z-docs-html.{tar.bz2,zip} packages.
Copy just the wxWidgets-x.y.z.zip package into the same distrib\release\x.y.z folder on Windows.
Run build/tools/release.bat x.y.z in a Windows command prompt. To avoid confusion note that, unlike other generated files, the Windows installer is created based on files as well as instructions (build/tools/wxwidgets.iss) contained in the copied release ZIP and not from the current working wx directory.
Copy these Windows packages back to your Linux or OSX distrib/release/x.y.z directory so you can continue with the upload step with all packages available:

wxMSW-x.y.z-Setup.exe wxWidgets-x.y.z.chm
Update the sha1sums in docs/release.md and commit the changes.

Uploading

Create a new release on GitHub using vX.Y.Z tag and title.

Use the content of docs/release.md for the release description box.

Attach the following files to it:

wxMSW-Setup-x.y.z.exe
wxWidgets-x.y.z.7z
wxWidgets-x.y.z.tar.bz2
wxWidgets-x.y.z.zip
wxWidgets-x.y.z.chm
wxWidgets-x.y.z-docs-html.tar.bz2
wxWidgets-x.y.z-docs-html.zip
wxWidgets-x.y.z-headers.7z

Create http://docs.wxwidgets.org/x.y.z/ (ask Bryan to do it if not done yet).

Announcement

Update https://www.wxwidgets.org, usually a news item is enough but something more can be called for for major releases.

Post docs/publicity/announce.txt at least to wx-announce@googlegroups.com and to wx-users for the important releases.

Submit a link to https://www.reddit.com/r/programming

Submit to https://isocpp.org/blog/suggest

For major releases, submit the announcement to https://slashdot.org/submission

Modify the links at downloads/index.html to point to the new release. Also update the release date on this page.

Also update docs/index.htm for the minor or major (i.e. not micro) releases.

Post to wxBlog if necessary.

Create a new post on our official Google+ page here: https://plus.google.com/+wxwidgets/ (contact Bryan for access)

Version Updates

Trac: mark the milestone corresponding to the release as completed and add a new version for it to allow reporting bugs against it and create the next milestone (ask Vadim or Robin to do it or to get admin password).

Update the roadmap at http://trac.wxwidgets.org/wiki/Roadmap to at least mention the new release there.

Run misc/scripts/inc_release to increment micro version, i.e. replace x.y.z with x.y.z+1 (minor or major versions updates require manual intervention) and rerun both bakefile_gen and autoconf afterwards to update the version in the generated files too.

Update the definition of the stable and release branches in build/buildbot/config/include/defs.xml after a minor version change.

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