Git based releases

[John Ralls]

On May 17, 2013, at 4:37 AM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:

> The next step in my work towards a fully git based development proces is to enable release 
> handling based on the git repository.
> 
> There were a few things missing in this respect:
> - the tag builds on win32 only started from svn. My commits a few days back have dealt with 
> this. So the next 2.5.x release will trigger a tag  build based on a git repository.
> - ChangeLog and release message list generation was svn based. I have just pushed some 
> commits to fix this as well. The top level makefile can now generate a ChangeLog starting 
> from a svn or git repo. Also a new utility has been added to generate the bulletted list for the 
> release news message: gitlog2ul.sh.
> 
> With these fixed, I believe we can now do releases without ever checking out an svn repo.
> 
> There's just one little caveat: the svn repo is currently still our canonical/primary/master repo 
> and tagging has to be done in that repo. That is because git tags can't be pushed to the svn 
> repo. Luckily we don't need to check out the svn repo to create a tag as tagging can be done 
> remotely. This limitation will be gone when git (at code.gnucash.org) will become the master 
> repo.
> 
> With these changes committed I have updated the Release Process wiki page (1). It now has 
> instructions on how to release based on a git repo. The old svn based release instructions are 
> still kept around for the remaining future 2.4.x releases (if any).
> 
> The git process should not require you to checkout the svn repo at all,  but will include one 
> svn cp command (to create the tag on the server side), and obviously any committed 
> changes during the release process have to be pushed using "git svn dcommit" still.
> 
> I would very much like the 2.5.2 release to be a test of the updated release process. John, 
> when you do the next release are you willing to proof-read,  follow and optionally improve 
> the git based release process as it is currently documented at (1) ? That would be very 
> helpful. Thanks.
> 
> By the way, my goal is to switch from svn to git as master repo as soon as we know we have 
> released the last 2.4 series release. IMO that will be when we release 2.6 at the latest. So I'd 
> like to do test runs like this as part of the 2.5.x release series to iron out as much wrinkles as 
> possible.

Geert,

OK. I'm planning to release 2.5.3 on the 27th. That should be soon enough that I won't forget. ;-)

Regards,
John Ralls