To make a release of Weston and/or Wayland, follow these steps.

  0.  Verify the test suites and codebase checks pass.  All of the
      tests pass should either pass or skip.

      $ make check

  1.  Update the first three lines of configure.ac to the intended
      version, commit.  Also note that Weston includes versioned
      dependencies on 'wayland-server' and 'wayland-client' in
      configure.ac which typically need updated as well.  Then commit
      your changes:

      $ export RELEASE_NUMBER="x.y.z"
      $ export RELEASE_NAME="[alpha|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.  For Weston releases, install Xwayland, either from your distro or
      manually (see http://wayland.freedesktop.org/building.html).  If
      you install it to a location other than /usr/bin/Xwayland, specify
      this in the following env var:

      export DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS="--with-xserver-path=<your-Xwayland-path>"

      If you're using a locally installed libinput or other dependency
      libraries, you'll likely need to set a few other environment
      variables:

      export WLD="<path-to-your-local-installation>"
      export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$WLD/lib
      export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$WLD/lib/pkgconfig:$WLD/share/pkgconfig/

  3.  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, also publish the publican documentation to
      wayland.freedesktop.org:

      $ ./publish-doc


  4.  Compose the release announcements.  The script will generate
      *.x.y.0.announce files with a list of changes and tags, one for
      wayland, one for weston.  Prepend these 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.

  5.  Send the release announcements to
      wayland-devel@lists.freedesktop.org

  6.  Get your freshly posted release email URL from
      http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/

  7.  Update releases.html in wayland-web with links to tarballs and
      the release email URL.

      The 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-! register_release x.y.z RC2") and
      customized.

      Once satisfied:

      $ git commit ./releases.html -m "Add ${RELEASE_NUMBER} release"
      $ git push
      $ ./deploy

  8.  Update topic in #wayland to point to the release announcement URL

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 release 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
    $ git push origin x.y

The master branch configure.ac version should always be (at least)
x.y.90, with x.y being the most recent stable branch.  Stable branch
configure 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.