To make a release of Wayland, follow these steps. 0. Verify the test suites and codebase checks pass. All of the tests should either pass or skip. $ make check 1. Update the first stanza of configure.ac to the intended version. Then commit your changes: $ export RELEASE_NUMBER="x.y.z" $ export RELEASE_NAME="[alpha|beta|RC1|RC2|official|point]" $ git status $ git commit configure.ac -m "configure.ac: bump to version $RELEASE_NUMBER for the $RELEASE_NAME release" $ git push 2. Run the release.sh script to generate the tarballs, sign and upload them, and generate a release announcement template. This script can be obtained from X.org's modular package: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/util/modular/tree/release.sh The script supports a --dry-run option to test it without actually doing a release. If the script fails on the distcheck step due to a testsuite error that can't be fixed for some reason, you can skip testsuite by specifying the --dist argument. Pass --help to see other supported options. $ release.sh . For Wayland official and point releases, also publish the publican documentation to wayland.freedesktop.org: $ ./publish-doc 3. Compose the release announcements. The script will generate *.x.y.z.announce files with a list of changes and tags. Prepend it with a human-readable listing of the most notable changes. For x.y.0 releases, indicate the schedule for the x.y+1.0 release. 4. PGP sign the release announcements and send them to wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org 5. Update releases.html in wayland-web with links to tarballs and the release email URL. The wl_register_release script in wayland-web will generate an HTML snippet that can be pasted into releases.html (or e.g. in emacs insert it via "C-u M-! scripts/wl_register_release x.y.z") and customized. Once satisfied: $ git commit ./releases.html -m "releases: Add ${RELEASE_NUMBER} release" $ git push $ ./deploy For x.y.0 releases, also create the release series x.y branch. The x.y branch is for bug fixes and conservative changes to the x.y.0 release, and is where we create x.y.z releases from. Creating the x.y branch opens up master for new development and lets new development move on. We've done this both after the x.y.0 release (to focus development on bug fixing for the x.y.1 release for a little longer) or before the x.y.0 release (like we did with the 1.5.0 release, to unblock master development early). $ git branch x.y [sha] $ git push origin x.y The master branch's configure.ac version should always be (at least) x.y.90, with x.y being the most recent stable branch. The stable branch's configure.ac version is just whatever was most recently released from that branch. For stable branches, we commit fixes to master first, then cherry-pick them back to the stable branch.