This file attempts to describe the procedure for creating releases and distributions of the Alan system.
The strategy requires a main development machine. Currently that is ThoNi's machine, where also https://ci.alanif.se is running a release job, "Alan Release".
Main development environment have for a long time been Cygwin (for its Unix capabilities and easy cross-compilation to Windows), but that is changing now that WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) exists.
In essence a release will have a semver version marking. Any development build before the release will have the same version marking but with a build number (added in the Jenkins jobs). Once the release is created all subsequent builds will have the next release version as its marking.
The release job will do
make release
This should always be done on the main development machine (ThoNi's) before any attempt to build release distributions on any secondary platform. It will check that the source files are checked in, and some other stuff. You can't do a release otherwise.
It then goes on to build the primary binaries for Windows (alan, arun, WinAlan and WinArun), currently using cross-compile from Cygwin (or WSL/Linux), for release and run all tests.
If that is successful, a tag (vX.Y.Z) is set at the current HEAD in the main branch. Later a branch for this OS, and a bugfix branch, can be created at the same commit.
Then all packages for the primary platform is uploaded to the Alan website.
The file LASTRELEASE will be updated to contain the venum of the last released version on the current branch.
Once this job has been run successfully the venum should be upgraded,
using venum if available, at least to:
vX.Y.(Z+1)
Using venum that is
venum alan correction
The files alan.version* should then be comitted.
On the next compile that upcoming version is written to the file NEXTRELEASE so that other platforms can use that as version (versions should only be updated on the main development machine).
On seconday platforms (Linux, MacOS) you should checkout the release tag and then do
make distribution
This should build all binaries, run all tests, and if succesful package them, and upload them to the web site. The distribution build should use LASTRELEASE as the version marking.
Normal builds on secondary platforms should use NEXTBUILD (since the primary platform will).
On some platforms there are some extra binaries, e.g gararun, the Gargoyle slot-in interpreter.
On Windows that has to be built separately. In a Cygwin terminal enable gararun and build it using
make gararun
You will have to upload it manually.