VTP Release Procedure

Last updated 2012.12.10

Anyone, in theory, can produce a release of the VTP software.  Here are the steps that i go through, to serve as a guide for anyone else to follow, or for anyone interested in the process.

The process starts on a Windows machine, switches to Linux, and back again.

Your Windows machine should have a folder C:\Distrib where the scripts etc. will expect to assemble their files.

  1. Check Mercurial (Bitbucket)
  2. Update the Version Number
  3. Build Everything with MSVC
  4. Test on Windows
  5. Build Everything on Linux
  6. Test on Linux
  7. Back on Windows, generate the source code documentation.
  8. Upload the source code documentation. This can either be done on Linux, or on Windows with Cygwin.
  9. We used to use scripts to create the source distribution Zip files, but these are now easy to get from the BitBucket repository site, so no need.
  10. If any APIs have changed versions, rebuild their Windows binary zips? We did this for years, but actually, this is just too difficult, and unlikely to work in the case of MSVC Debug libraries, so let's just hope developers can figure out how to build the dependencies themselves.
  11. Rebuild the Windows Installers
  12. If you are the webmaster, update all URLs in the download and build instructions on the website.  A way to do this that's not error-prone is to do a semi-automatic seach-and-replace on the release date, e.g. if the previous version was 031024 and the current is 031105, search and replace those strings.
  13. Upload all zipfiles and installer exes that have changed.
    From: C:\Distrib
    To: vterrain.org/public_html/dist
  14. If you are the mailing list moderator, announce the release.