Release Process

The intention of this page is to document the release process, so that anyone taking over responsibility for this task has a reference for all steps involved.

The release manager needs the following in order to complete this process:


 * Core Member Access to the Github OpenMW organization
 * Access to the OpenMW facebook page
 * Access to the OpenMW Twitter account
 * An account on the OpenMW Wordpress
 * Access to the OpenMW Youtube Account

The current Podcaster traditionally produces a video commentary to accompany each release.

Release process steps

 * 1) The project lead calls for release packages to be built and tested
 * 2) Once the release packages have been tested sufficiently, the project lead will call for release, and tag the release on GitHub
 * 3) At this point, the Podcaster begins working on a release video
 * 4) * Guidelines for doing this may be found here
 * 5) The Release Manager then writes the release announcement, using the changelog in the readme
 * 6) The release announcement has the following components:
 * 7) An intro paragraph, which summarizes the release and directs readers to the downloads page. See the
 * 8) A link to the release video, crediting the Podcaster
 * 9) A list of critical Known Issues from the release
 * 10) * Any un-fixed known critical issues from the last release are carried over
 * 11) * Any new known issues found during development and release testing are added
 * 12) A list of changes, taken from the release readme, and rewritten to be understandable by normal users
 * 13) * Reference the bug reports on the bug tracker https://bugs.openmw.org/ to understand and rewrite the changelog items
 * 14) The release announcement is then posted on the forum for approval/edits by the team
 * 15) Once the video is done, release packages are built, and release announcement is approved, the Release Manager does the release
 * 16) A release is made on the Github OpenMW page
 * 17) All release packages are uploaded to the Github release
 * 18) The Linux binary packages
 * 19) The Windows executable packages
 * 20) The OS X package
 * 21) The release source, which should be automatically included by the Github release system
 * 22) The Release Announcement is posted to the Wordpress blog
 * 23) * If the youtube video has not been made public yet, make it public on the OpenMW youtube account
 * 24) * TODO: raevol needs to figure out why he can't embed the youtube video...
 * 25) A tweet is made on the OpenMW Twitter announcing the release and linking to the website
 * 26) A post is made on the OpenMW facebook announcing the release
 * 27) * Do a Picture post, using a screenshot from the release, so that people can re-share the post
 * 28) * You can cheat and just screenshot the release video if getting a good screenshot of the release isn't working
 * 29) * Paste the plaintext version of the release announcement as the description of the picture
 * 30) Post on the OpenMW forum announcing that the release has been completed

Example Summary
The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.27.0! Grab it from our Downloads Page for all operating systems. This release brings the first official release of OpenCS, the OpenMW team’s efforts to bring an open source solution for editing content for OpenMW. OpenCS is in an early Alpha state, please take that into consideration when testing! See the full notes below.