solidity/ReleaseChecklist.md

Checklist for making a release:

Requirements

• Lauchpad (Ubuntu One) account
• gnupg key (has to be version 1, gpg2 won't work) for your-name@ethereum.org created and uploaded
• Write access to https://github.com/ethereum/homebrew-ethereum

Blog Post

• Create a post on solidity-blog in the Releases category and explain some of the new features or concepts.
• Create a post on solidity-blog in the Security Alerts category in case of important bug(s).

Documentation check

• Run make linkcheck from within docs/ and fix any broken links it finds. Ignore false positives caused by href anchors and dummy links not meant to work.

Changelog

• Sort the changelog entries alphabetically and correct any errors you notice. Commit it.
• Update the changelog to include a release date.
• Run scripts/update_bugs_by_version.py to regenerate bugs_by_version.json from the changelog and bugs.json. Make sure that the resulting bugs_by_version.json has a new, empty entry for the new version.
• Commit changes, create a pull request and wait for the tests. Then merge it.
• Copy the changelog into the release blog post.

Create the Release

• Create Github release page: https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/releases/new
• On the release page, select the develop branch as new target and set tag to the new version (e.g. v0.8.5) (make sure you only SAVE DRAFT instead of PUBLISH RELEASE before the actual release)
• Thank voluntary contributors in the Github release page (use git shortlog -s -n -e v0.5.3..origin/develop).
• Check that all tests on the latest commit in develop are green.
• Click the PUBLISH RELEASE button on the release page, creating the tag.
• Wait for the CI runs on the tag itself.

Upload Release Artifacts and Publish Binaries

• Switch to the tag that archives have to be created for.
• Create the prerelease.txt file: (echo -n > prerelease.txt).
• Run scripts/create_source_tarball.sh while being on the tag to create the source tarball. This will create the tarball in a directory called upload.
• Take the tarball from the upload directory (its name should be solidity_x.x.x.tar.gz, otherwise prerelease.txt was missing in the step before) and upload the source tarball to the release page.
• Take the github-binaries.tar tarball from c_release_binaries run of the tagged commit in circle-ci and add all binaries from it to the release page. Make sure it contains four binaries: solc-windows.exe, solc-macos, solc-static-linux and soljson.js.
• Take the solc-bin-binaries.tar tarball from c_release_binaries run of the tagged commit in circle-ci and add all binaries from it to solc-bin.
• Run ./update --reuse-hashes in solc-bin and verify that the script has updated list.js, list.txt and list.json files correctly and that symlinks to the new release have been added in solc-bin/wasm/ and solc-bin/emscripten-wasm32/.
• Create a pull request in solc-bin and merge.

Homebrew and MacOS

• Update the version and the hash (sha256sum solidity_$VERSION.tar.gz) in https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/solidity.rb
• Update the version and the hash (sha256sum solidity_$VERSION.tar.gz) in https://github.com/ethereum/homebrew-ethereum/blob/master/solidity.rb

Docker

• Run ./scripts/docker_deploy_manual.sh v$VERSION).

PPA

• Make sure the ethereum/cpp-build-deps PPA repository contains libz3-static-dev builds for all current versions of ubuntu. If not run scripts/deps-ppa/static-z3.sh (after changing email address and key id and adding the missing ubuntu version) and wait for the builds to succeed before continuing.
• Change scripts/release_ppa.sh to match your key's email and key id; double-check that DISTRIBUTIONS contains the most recent versions.
• Run scripts/release_ppa.sh v$VERSION to create the PPA release (you need the relevant openssl key).
• Wait for the ~ethereum/ubuntu/ethereum-static PPA build to be finished and published for all platforms. SERIOUSLY: DO NOT PROCEED EARLIER!!! After the static builds are published, copy the static package to the ~ethereum/ubuntu/ethereum PPA for the destination series Trusty, Xenial and Bionic while selecting Copy existing binaries.

Release solc-js

• Wait until solc-bin was properly deployed. You can test this via remix - a test run through remix is advisable anyway.
• Increment the version number, create a pull request for that, merge it after tests succeeded.
• Run npm run build:tarball in the updated solc-js repository to create solc-<version>.tgz. Inspect the tarball to ensure that it contains an up to date compiler binary.
• Run npm run publish:tarball to publish the newly created tarball.
• Create a tag using git tag --annotate v$VERSION and push it with git push --tags.

Post-release

• Make sure the documentation for the new release has been published successfully. Go to https://readthedocs.org/projects/solidity/ and verify that the new version is listed, works and is marked as default.
• Publish the blog posts.
• Create a commit to increase the version number on develop in CMakeLists.txt and add a new skeleton changelog entry.
• Announce on Twitter, including links to the release and the blog post. Use #xp at the end of the tweet to automatically cross post the announcement to Fosstodon.
• Share the announcement on Reddit in /r/ethdev, cross-posted to /r/ethereum.
• Share the announcement the Solidity forum in the Announcements category.
• Update the release information section on soliditylang.org.
• Lean back, wait for bug reports and repeat from step 1 :)