wxWidgets/docs/contributing/how-to-release.md

Making a New wxWidgets Release

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

• Linux (or another Unix but GNU tar is required).
• 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.

Checking ABI Compatibility

For the stable (even) releases only, check that binary compatibility hasn't been broken since the last stable release.

Checking under Unix systems using abi-compliance-checker tool.

Instructions:

1. Get the tool.
2. Build the old (vX.Y.Z-1) library with -g -Og options, i.e. configure it with --enable-debug and CXXFLAGS=-Og CFLAFS=-Og. For convenience, let's assume it's built in "$old" subdirectory.
3. Build the new (vX.Y.Z) library with the same options in "$new".
4. Create directories for temporary files containing the ABI dumps for the old and new libraries: mkdir -p ../compat/{$old,$new}.
5. Run abi-dumper on all libraries: for l in $old/lib/*.so; do abi-dumper $l -lver $old -o ../compat/$old/$(basename $l).dump; done and the same thing with the new libraries.
6. Run abi-compliance-checker on each pair of produced dumps to generate HTML reports: for l in 3.0.2/*dump; do abi-compliance-checker -l $(basename $l .dump) -old $l -new 3.0.3/$(basename $l); done.
7. Examine these reports, paying attention to the problem summary.

Checking under MSW systems.

Manually check compatibility by building the widgets samples from the old tree and then run it using the new DLLs.

Pre-Release Steps

1. Perform the following steps. You can run build/tools/pre-release.sh to do the straightforward changes like updating the date and version number automatically, but please also review and update the contents of the README and announcement text.

   • Update docs/readme.txt: version needs to be changed, content updated.
   • Update docs/release.md: also version and reset SHA-1 sums 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.

2. Commit the changes and tag the release using your GPG key:

   git tag -s -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.

1. 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.

2. Copy just the wxWidgets-x.y.z.zip package into the same distrib\release\x.y.z folder on Windows.

3. 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.

4. Copy wxMSW-x.y.z-Setup.exe back to your Linux or OSX distrib/release/x.y.z directory so you can continue with the upload step with all packages available. Also create a ZIP file from the CHM one:

   zip wxWidgets-x.y.z-docs-chm.zip wxWidgets-x.y.z.chm

   and copy/move it to the same directory.

5. Run ./build/tools/post-release.sh to update the SHA-1 sums in docs/release.md, then commit the changes. Notice that when making an RC, the version must be explicitly specified on this script command line.

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

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

Announcement

Update https://www.wxwidgets.org:

• Update release information (at least version and released) in _data/relases.yml.
• Download information can then be updated by running update_release_info.rb. This will update the asset information from GitHub.
• Update the list of compilers used for making MSW binaries in downloads/index.md if necessary (note that there is no need to update anything else, the page will dynamically show the release files with the specified prefixes).
• Add a news item. 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.

Submit a link to https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp or r/programming (depending on the release importance).

Submit to https://isocpp.org/blog/suggest (need to be logged in to do it).

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

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 https://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.

MSW Visual Studio Official Builds

To build official x86 and x64 shared binaries the following are prerequisites:

• Visual Studio 2012, 2013, 2015
• Windows SDK 6.1, 7.1 (required for x64 builds for Visual Studio 2008, 2010)
• 7z (required for packaging the files)
• fciv (required for generating the checksums)

The VSxxxCOMNTOOLS environment variables are used to locate the tools required for Visual Studio 2012, 2013 and 2015. There are no Microsoft defined variables for the SDKs used for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. The build will look for the following environment variables for the Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 SDK tools:

WINDOWS61SDK WINDOWS71SDK

If either of these are blank they are set to the default install location.

To build binaries for a single compiler, open a command prompt (for Visual Studio 2008 only an SDK 6.1 developer's command prompt must be used), cd to the build\msw\tools\msvs folder and run the batch file 'buildofficial' with the vcXXX version number:

Visual Studio 2008 vc90 Visual Studio 2010 vc100 Visual Studio 2012 vc110 Visual Studio 2014 vc120 Visual Studio 2015 vc140

This will build all of the x86 and x64 binaries for the selected compiler version, package them in 7z files and calculate the checksums. The 7z files and the checksums are output to the build\msw\packages folder.

All of the compiler packages can be built at the same time by executing the build\msw\tools\buildall.bat file (including Visual Studio 2000).