- release-candidate branch: The branch used for staging of the next release.
Named like
release-v0.8.26
- release branch: The branch to which successful release-candidates are merged
and tagged with the new version. Named literally
release
.
- The release-candidate branch must be made in the paritytech/polkadot repo in order for release automation to work correctly
- Any new pushes/merges to the release-candidate branch (for example, refs/heads/release-v0.8.26) will result in the rc index being bumped (e.g., v0.8.26-rc1 to v0.8.26-rc2) and new wasms built.
Below are the steps of the release workflow. Steps prefixed with NOACTION are automated and require no human action.
- To initiate the release process, branch master off to a release branch and push it to Github:
git checkout master; git pull; git checkout -b release-v0.8.26; git push origin refs/heads/release-v0.8.26
- NOACTION: The current HEAD of the release-candidate branch is tagged
v0.8.26-rc1
- NOACTION: A draft release and runtime WASMs are created for this release-candidate automatically. A link to the draft release will be linked in the internal polkadot matrix channel.
- NOACTION: A new Github issue is created containing a checklist of manual steps to be completed before we are confident with the release. This will be linked in Matrix.
- Complete the steps in the issue created in step 4, signing them off as completed
- (optional) If a fix is required to the release-candidate:
- Merge the fix with
master
first - Cherry-pick the commit from
master
torelease-v0.8.26
, fixing any merge conflicts. Try to avoid unnecessarily bumping crates. - Push the release-candidate branch to Github - this is now the new release- candidate
- Depending on the cherry-picked changes, it may be necessary to perform some or all of the manual tests again.
- Once happy with the release-candidate, perform the release using the release
script located at
scripts/release.sh
(or perform the steps in that script manually):
./scripts/release.sh v0.8.26
- NOACTION: The HEAD of the
release
branch will be tagged withv0.8.26
, and a final draft release will be created on Github.
Occasionally there may be changes that need to be made to the most recently
released version of Polkadot, without taking every change to master
since
the last release. For example, in the event of a security vulnerability being
found, where releasing a fixed version is a matter of some expediency. In cases
like this, the fix should first be merged with master, cherry-picked to a branch
forked from release
, tested, and then finally merged with release
. A
sensible versioning scheme for changes like this is vX.Y.Z-1
.