MaintainersCorner/Releasing/Autotools

Rolling the tarball

• The usual ./autogen.sh && make && make install && make distcheck

• Fix any issues that crop up. Distcheck errors can be particularly difficult, but releasing often makes it easier to discover and fix these problems.

Some tips:

• If a file comes up not found during distcheck, check that the file in question has been added to the Makefile.am in the component it comes from—this can be the case if the files are referenced by po/POTFILES.in but someone forgot to add that file to the Makefile.am.

• Don’t forget to unset environment variables like LINGUAS that influence tarball generation (translations in this case).

• If you need to make additional changes to fix distcheck, don’t forget to re-commit.

Then distcheck finishes. It should show you something like this:

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gnome-panel-2.3.1.tar.gz is ready for distribution
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