NOTE: THIS DOCUMENT IS A WORK IN PROGRESS!
This document collects information about successfully releasing LLVM to the public. It is the release manager's guide to ensuring that a high quality build of LLVM is released. Mostly, it's just a bunch of reminders of things to do at release time so we don't inadvertently ship something that is utility deficient.
There are three main tasks for building a release of LLVM:
Review the documentation and ensure that it is up to date. The Release Notes must be updated to reflect bug fixes, new known issues, and changes in the list of supported platforms. The Getting Started Guide should be updated to reflect the new release version number tag avaiable from CVS and changes in basic system requirements.
Merge any work done on branches intended for release into mainline. Finish and commit all new features or bug fixes that are scheduled to go into the release. Work that is not to be incorporated into the release should not be merged from branchs or commited from developer's working directories.
From this point until the release branch is created, developers should not commit changes to the llvm and llvm-gcc CVS repositories unless it is a bug fix for the release.
Rebuild the LibDeps.txt target in utils/llvm-config. This makes sure that the llvm-config utility remains relevant for the release, reflecting any changes in the library dependencies.
Use the nightly test reports and 'make check' (deja-gnu based tests) to ensure that recent changes and merged branches have not destabilized LLVM. Platforms which are used less often should be given special attention as they are the most likely to break from commits from the previous step.
Tag and branch the CVS HEAD using the following procedure:
cvs -d <CVS Repository> co -r release_XX llvm
cvs -d <CVS Repository> co -r release_XX llvm-test
cvs -d <CVS Repository> co -r release_XX llvm-gcc
Build both debug and release (optimized) versions of LLVM on all platforms. Ensure the build is warning and error free on each platform.
Build a new version of the LLVM GCC front-end after building the LLVM tools. Once that is complete, go back to the LLVM source tree and build and install the llvm/runtime libraries.
Run make check and ensure there are no unexpected failures. If there are, resolve the failures, commit them back into the release branch, and restart testing by re-building LLVM.
Ensure that 'make check' passes on all platforms for all targets. If certain failures cannot be resolved before release time, determine if marking them XFAIL is appropriate. If not, fix the bug and go back. The test suite must complete with "0 unexpected failures" for release.
Run the llvm-test suite and ensure there are no unacceptable failures. If there are, resolve the failures and go back to re-building LLVM. The test suite should be run in Nightly Test mode. All tests must pass.
Create source distributions for LLVM, LLVM GCC, and the LLVM Test Suite by exporting the source from CVS and archiving it. This can be done with the following commands:
cvs -d <CVS Repository> export -r release_XX llvm
cvs -d <CVS Repository> export -r release_XX llvm-test
cvs -d <CVS Repository> export -r release_XX llvm-gcc
mkdir cfrontend; mv llvm-gcc cfrontend/src
tar -cvf - llvm | gzip > llvm-X.X.tar.gz
tar -cvf - llvm-test | gzip > llvm-test-X.X.tar.gz
tar -cvf - cfrontend/src | gzip > cfrontend-X.X.source.tar.gz
Creating the LLVM GCC binary distribution requires performing the following steps for each supported platform:
Release the distribution tarball to the public. This consists of generating several tarballs. The first set, the source distributions, are automatically generated by the "make dist" and "make dist-check". There are gzip, bzip2, and zip versions of these bundles.
The second set of tarballs is the binary release. When "make dist-check" succeeds, it will have created an _install directory into which it installed the binary release. You need to rename that directory as "llvm" and then create tarballs from the contents of that "llvm" directory.
Finally, use rpm to make an rpm package based on the llvm.spec file. Don't forget to update the version number, documentation, etc. in the llvm.spec file.