Dev:Doc/Process/Release Checklist

Release Checklist

Targets

See the Projects page for the release targets and schedule.

Checklist

This page is to keep a record of tasks we need to perform each release.

Pre-release

Task	Who
Splash screen	Ton Roosendaal coordinates. Previous splash maker (or selector) picks new splash maker (or selector).
Wiki dev docs and release logs	Gaia Clary keeps an eye on this.

Final testing

Task	Details	Who
Regression Tests	Run all files in the Regression Suite (Blender, Game Engine...)	Everyone!
Automated tests (bundled scripts, Cycles...)	Check all tests pass. See the Automated Testing project.	Bastien Montagne Sergey Sharybin
Check all context sensitive manual links.	See the bl_rna_manual_reference.py script.	Aaron Carlisle

Git work

Task	Details	Who
Version bump (BKE_blender_version.h)	BLENDER_VERSION, BLENDER_SUBVERSION, BLENDER_VERSION_CHAR, BLENDER_VERSION_CYCLE These values are available in the API and used for documentation generation so they should be correct before any release, even minor ones.	Sergey Sharybin
Update Doxyfile	Set PROJECT_NUMBER to correct version. File: doc/doxygen/Doxyfile.	Sergey Sharybin
Update Splash	splash.png, splash_2x.png in (./release/datafiles/)	Sergey Sharybin
Update Startup (as needed)	startup.blend in (./release/datafiles/), Use patch https://developer.blender.org/P237 to avoid writing ID-Properties into startup.	Sergey Sharybin
Tag Git	Tag Blender, Add-ons and translations Repository	Sergey Sharybin

Release binaries

Upload compiled releases & checksum to:

 http://download.blender.org/release/ BlenderX.XX

Create compressed source-code archive using: make tgz, then upload output:

 http://download.blender.org/source/

Platform Managers

See: Platform Maintainers section in module owners page.

Operating System (Linux)
Owner(s)	Sergey Sharybin
Member(s)	Campbell Barton, Bastien Montagne

Operating System (MacOSX)
Owner(s)	Arto Kitula, Francesco Siddi
Member(s)	Martijn Berger

Operating System (Windows)
Owner(s)	Ray Molenkamp
Member(s)	Martijn Berger

Builds from source but currently not included in all official releases:

Operating System (FreeBSD)
Owner(s)	Pete Larabell
Member(s)	Campbell Barton, Sergey Sharybin

Web site work

Task	Who
1 Write/Update release logs on www.blender.org	Marco Ardito
2 Write/Update bugfixes list in release logs	Bastien Montagne
3 Update download section with new links and info	Thomas Dinges
4 Upload new API Docs	Bastien Montagne
5 Make sure all mirrors are synced	???
6 Update blender.org frontpage	Ton Roosendaal
7 Make developer credits list	Aaron Carlisle
8 Bump the manual version	Aaron Carlisle

Release Notes Checklist

We don't need to be overly-strict about following these points, however doing so should help giving release notes a more professional appeal.

Task

Add images and bullet list descriptions for categories to release notes landing page (writing style should match previous release notes).

Ensure category headings and images all link to correct subpages

Check if categories/sub-pages should be merged (we don't need own sub-pages for less then a handful of changes).

Ensure all sub-pages have correct heading (e.g. "Blender 2.78: Cycles")

Ensure features are nicely presented using images and/or videos.

Collect videos for "Feature Videos" sub-page, ideally with a table of contents if needed.

Write/Update bugfixes list in release logs (Bastien Montagne handles these currently, see web site work section above).

Ensure all changes described in sub-pages contain linked commit hashes, these should also follow a consistent style (e.g. "(7b96f02)" or "(53d73c5, 56021ca)")

Ensure consistent writing style across all pages.

Ensure pages don't contain typos, incomprehensible descriptions, bad grammar, etc.

Collect a list of missing notes from git history (e.g. list for missing 2.76 notes). This is a really tedious process but ideally we'd do it for every release. We were trying to automate this a bit in the past, without much success)