2.1.0 Release

[Christian Stimming]

Hi Nathan,

thanks for the quick reaction - however, the release process used to be 
centered around the source-only packages. Now that we want to provide windows 
binaries (and you have thankfully volunteered to build them), we obviously 
need to change or adjust the process. So that's what we need to figure out.

Am Sonntag, 15. April 2007 06:57 schrieb Nathan Buchanan:
> Hi Chris!
>
> Just saw that you released 2.1.0 (unstable). I'm thinking I better add some
> windows binaries for this too. (because in all honesty, most windows users
> probably won't have a clue what to do with tar.gz / tar.bz2 files)

Absolutely. We (the devs) were hoping we could provide a windows binary for 
each of the 2.1.x releases and any of the following.

> What revision did you use? 

Just to explain the options that you have to look this up yourself: Are you 
subscribed to the mailing list gnucash-patches? There you'd see the commit 
message where the version number has been changed to 2.1.0 (in this case, it 
was r15892). You can browse the recent commits as well at 
http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/timeline and see which one modified the file 
gnucash/trunk/configure.in

Ideally we would have copied the revision that was released to a separate 
tags/ directory which you would then see under 
http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/browser/gnucash/tags ; however, this time this 
hasn't happened so far (but you can see e.g. the subdirectory for 2.0.5 
there)

Also ideally Andreas Köhler was hoping to adjust the install.sh script so that 
it automatically retrieves the SVN sources exactly from the point of release 
(probably through the respective tags/ as well); however, he hasn't been able 
to finish this in time.

> Do you expect to update the source files you released often?  

The schedule for further release should be at 
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Release_Schedule ; once a tarball is released 
(from a respective SVN revision), we don't plan to change this. If there is a 
major error, we don't change the tarball but rather release a new version 
number.

> I guess I'm really asking how we normally do things, as 
> I'm still getting the hang of things. (I eventually should get the script
> to build from a tarball)

Absolutely. As I said, the old release process hasn't included a win32 binary, 
so it needs to be adjusted. Feel free to explain how it would be easiest for 
you.

> I downloaded gnucash-2.1.0.tar.gz and noticed that the root folder seems to
> be "gnucash-2.1.0." - with a trailing period. 

Is it? That's a major error.

> This does not seem to work in 
> windows. Windows trims off the trailing period and tar gets totally
> confused. Could we not release tarballs that contain folders with trailing
> periods?

Yes. The folder name must not contain a trailing period. This needs to be 
fixed. 

Christian