PSRCHIVE Administration Guide

Preparing a Release

When ready to distribute the next release of PSRCHIVE, it is important to first thoroughly test the code on as many different machines and architectures as possible.

To do this, run 

make distcheck
This make target is built into automake; it will create a tarball of the source code (including the configure script), then unpack it, build it from scratch, run make check and make install, and make distclean. This step is vital to ensure that all required files are packed and ready for release.

After successful completion of make distcheck on a number of different machines, create a new branch off of the main trunk with a standardized release name (psrchive-YYYY-MM) then push that branch to the main sourceforge git repository; e.g. 

git checkout -b psrchive-2020-01-10
git push origin psrchive-2020-01-10
git push --set-upstream origin psrchive-2020-01-10
Edit configure.ac and change the AC_INIT line to reflect the new release number; e.g. 
AC_INIT([PSRCHIVE],[2020-01-10],[psrchive-developers@lists.sourceforge.net])
Then commit the change and create the final version of the release; e.g. 
git commit -m "release 2020-01-10" configure.ac
git push
make dist
The make dist step will create the distribution file, psrchive-2020-01-10.tar.gz. Release the distribution.