annotate DOCS/tech/release-howto.txt @ 36920:40ad45360c8a

Replace old item 'potmeter' by new item 'pimage'. Recent versions of the X11/GTK GUI didn't allow to control a potmeter, because that didn't seem to make any sense. In order to get rid of the confusing potmeter that doesn't distinguish from a hpotmeter and in order to allow the more useful behaviour recent versions of the X11/GTK GUI have been utilized (and because we're still supporting item 'potmeter' for reasons of compatibility with old skins), introduce new item 'pimage' that reuses most of the current potmeter code. Additionally, remove remaining code and documentation of 'potmeter'.

How to make an MPlayer release
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

preparations:
- Announce the intent to create a release branch on mailing lists and IRC.
- Ask translators to get their languages synchronized.
- Update the Changelog.
- Identify regressions or other serious issues, fix or revert (on the branch)
  as needed so the release is of good quality.
- Find a codename for the release
- update osdep/mplayer.rc if necessary
- possibly bump etc/codecs.conf "release" line

create the release tree:
- tag Subversion with release name
- update release.sh script with version number
***the following steps are done automatically by release.sh script***
- checkout the mplayer src tree
- Add a VERSION file with the release version to the root of the source tree.
- check out FFmpeg subdirs
- remove obsolete DOCS translations, help files

- build the HTML docs from XML sources, then clean up

release the tree:
    cd ..
    mv main MPlayer-0.90rc5
    tar -cf MPlayer-0.90rc5.tar MPlayer-0.90rc5
    bzip2 -9 MPlayer-0.90rc5.tar
***end of part done by release.sh**

test it (download to your local machine, extract, compile, run)
 - compilers: gcc 4.x, gcc 3.x, gcc 2.95, MinGW, Cygwin
 - architectures: PPC, AMD64, x86 with MMX[2], SSE[2], 3DNow
 - OS: Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac OS X

copy to FTP:
    cp MPlayer-0.90rc5.tar.bz2 /home/ftp/MPlayer/releases/
    cp Changelog-0.90rc5 and update Changelog symlink
    md5sum MPlayer-0.90rc5.tar.bz2 > MPlayer-0.90rc5.tar.bz2.md5

Write a news entry for the release, update the links in dload.html. Test it,
sometimes links are broken. Do not forget the translations.

Send the release notes as a mail to the mplayer-announce mailing list.

Add the new release version to bugzilla page.

Update release version in #mplayer and #mplayerdev topics.

Update project page on Freshmeat

Done.