Release Process

Introduction

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Doing a Dolphin Release does require some steps, but if you know what to do it's fairly straightforward.

Releases are supposed to be tagged on the "stable" branch. Whenever a major release is about to be released, the "master" branch needs to be merged into "stable". For hotfix releases, the important commits should be cherry-picked manually from master.

Details

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1. Merge master into the 'stable' branch such that after merge "stable == master". All following steps refer to that branch.
2. Edit the main CMakeLists.txt file and change set(DOLPHIN_IS_STABLE, FALSE) to set(DOLPHIN_IS_STABLE, TRUE). Also, update the DOLPHIN_VERSION_MAJOR, DOLPHIN_VERSION_MINOR and DOLPHIN_VERSION_PATCH lines.
3. Update PRODUCT_VERSION in Installer/Installer.nsi.
4. Create an annotated tag named after the version number.
5. Perform a clean Windows build of the "Release Win32" and "Release x64" configurations.
6. Install NSIS if you haven't already; Create the Windows installers via the Installer_win32.nsi and Installer_x64.nsi files respectively (stored inside the Installer subdirectory).
7. XX I'm using this to compile for Mac OS X, but it needs to be updated as post-4.0.1 has libusbx built in and LTO should be in the CMakeLists: cmake . -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-O4 -DNDEBUG" -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-O4 -DNDEBUG -DLIBUSB_INCLUDE_DIR=/opt/usb/include/libusb-1.0 -DLIBUSB_LIBRARIES=/opt/usb/lib/libusb-1.0.0.dylib && make -j8
8. For Mac OS X, create a dmg as follows: hdiutil create dolphin-4.0.1.dmg -volname "Dolphin 4.0.1" -fs HFS+ -srcfolder Binaries -ov
9. TODO: Create Non-Windows installers.
10. Create a changes summary for broad consumption.
11. Write release announcement as a blog article on the homepage
12. Upload installers to homepage
13. Publish announcement blog article
14. Create a minimalistic forum thread about the release (cf. the 4.0 announcement) and update the blog article to link to this thread for discussion.
15. Forward announcement to social media (Facebook, …).
16. Update the forum header to say that a new release has happened (Admin CP, Templates&Style, Templates, Simpl Templates, Header Templates, header, Options, Full Edit, then update the html with the new version and links)
17. Update the wiki templates https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sitenotice and https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Anonnotice with the appropriate version and links.
18. Major releases only: Merge stable back to master to bump the version number.