8 Preparing Releases

There are a number of utilities and software packages that are needed to prepare a PPW release (these are in addition to the normal requirements to build PPW). For the PPW backend, the following are needed:

• GNU Autotools
• GNU Texinfo
• ImageMagick (used by scripts for image processing)
• A Latex installation (e.g., TeX Live on Linux)
• Ghostscript (probably...)
• Doxygen

For the PPW frontend GUI:

• For Windows:
  • Launch4j, to wrap JARs in Windows executables
  • NSIS (nullsoft scriptable install system), for the installer
  • NetBeans, recommended for working with the Java code on Windows
• For Linux (and similar platforms), tools to build RPM and DEB archives
• For Mac OS X, tools to build disk image

Steps to release a new version of PPW:

1. Start with a fresh working copy of the PPW source (from trunk). To build a PPW release, you will need to be able to run configure directly within the working copy (not in a separate build directory).
2. Bootstrap the source tree (you may need to bootstrap gasnet-tools first).
3. Do configure (probably with appropriate options) and make within the working copy.
4. Double-check version number in configure.ac, and any other places that include that version number. Usually just running the update-versions.pl script that gets generated by autoconf will ensure that the version number is updated in the correct places.
5. Update the docs (especially user manual) to reflect any changes or feature enhancements.
6. Update the NEWS file to show changes and release date.
7. Commit any changes made in the steps above to trunk. Now is a good time for some final testing that everything still looks good.
8. Make new tag in tags directory (server-side svn cp) of the form RELEASE_X_Y.
9. Within the docs directory, do make gen to generate documentation. You will now have docs files in docs/site, along with updated man pages, etc. and files such as MANUAL within your working copy. The online (HTML) docs (and images) within javasrc will also have been updated automatically.
10. Within the javasrc directory, do ant dist to update the JAR files to be distributed with the PPW release.
11. Create UNIX source distribution by doing make distcheck. You will now have a ppw-X.Y.tar.gz file in your working copy.

    Note that typing make release might do some of the above steps for you automatically, aside from updating the NEWS file and making the svn tags.

12. Create new Java webstart, windows, and OSX versions of GUI (see javasrc/deploy).
13. Test all source tarballs and binaries above on as many platforms as feasible.
14. Update the PPW website with the following:
    • New downloads
    • New Java web start version in the site/jws directory
    • Appropriate files in the site/vX.Y/sampledata directory
    • New HTML versions of the user manual that you obtained from the make gen command above
15. Update the PPW Bugzilla (under http://bugzilla.hcs.ufl.edu) to include the latest version of PPW (navigate to the “Products” page, where you should see Parallel Performance Wizard listed). Also make sure the milestones, default milestone, components, etc. are up to date.
16. Update the docs/ppw-devguide.texi file for any new additions to the release process.
17. Send email announcements out, including to ppw AT hcs DOT ufl DOT edu.