hledger/RELEASING.md

Releasing

Guidance for release managers and maintainers.

Terminology:

• “main” = the master branch in the main hledger repo (might be renamed to main in future).
• “release” = a release branch in the main hledger repo, such as 1.22.

Changelogs

Always maintain changelogs in main.

Apply CONTRIBUTING.md#commit-messages rules when commiting, pushing, or reviewing/merging pull requests. tools/commitlint helps with this, run locally and in CI.

Use ./Shake changelogs to update them from recent commit messages.

Minor release

Checklist:

1. create release branch if none
   git branch RELEASEBRANCH RELEASETAG
git branch 1.22-branch 1.22

2. update main changelogs

   • ./Shake changelogs
   • do at least basic editing - drop things, move things
   • ./Shake changelogs -c

3. review changes so far, estimate which packages will be released

4. add “unreleased” minor release heading in main changelogs, immediately above previous release heading ``` # LATESTHASH

   …

   # X.Y.1 unreleased <- new heading

   # X.Y YYYY-MM-DD ```

5. cherry pick changes to release

   1. always update main changelogs first
   2. cherry pick minor-release-worthy commits
      • don’t cherry pick changelog commits, “dev: doc: update …”
   3. in main changelogs, move corresponding change items under minor release heading

6. finalise release

   • add date to minor release heading in main changelogs
   • copy the minor release section from main changelogs to release changelogs