# Releases

## Release process

Going through an example of releasing NixOS 17.09:

### One month before the beta

- Send an email to the nix-devel mailinglist as a warning about upcoming beta "feature freeze" in a month.

- Discuss with Eelco Dolstra and the community (via IRC, ML) about what will reach the deadline. Any issue or Pull Request targeting the release should be included in the release milestone.

### At beta release time

- Create an issue for tracking Zero Hydra Failures progress. ZHF is an effort to get build failures down to zero.

- `git tag -a -s -m "Release 17.09-beta" 17.09-beta && git push --tags`

- From the master branch run `git checkout -B release-17.09`.

- Make sure a channel is created at http://nixos.org/channels/.

- Let a GitHub nixpkgs admin lock the branch on github for you. (so developers can’t force push)

- Bump the `system.defaultChannel` attribute in `nixos/modules/misc/version.nix`

- Update `versionSuffix` in `nixos/release.nix`, use `git log --format=%an|wc -l` to get the commit count

- `echo -n "18.03" > .version` on master.

- Pick a new name for the unstable branch.

- Create a new release notes file for the upcoming release + 1, in this case `rl-1803.xml`.

- Create two Hydra jobsets: release-17.09 and release-17.09-small with `stableBranch` set to false.

- Edit changelog at `nixos/doc/manual/release-notes/rl-1709.xml` (double check desktop versions are noted)

  - Get all new NixOS modules `git diff release-17.03..release-17.09 nixos/modules/module-list.nix|grep ^+`

  - Note systemd, kernel, glibc and Nix upgrades.

### During Beta

- Monitor the master branch for bugfixes and minor updates and cherry-pick them to the release branch.

### Before the final release

- Re-check that the release notes are complete.

- Release Nix (currently only Eelco Dolstra can do that). Make sure fallback is updated.

- Update README.md with new stable NixOS version information.

- Change `stableBranch` to true and wait for channel to update.

### At final release time

- `git tag -s -a -m "Release 15.09" 15.09`

- Update http://nixos.org/nixos/download.html and http://nixos.org/nixos/manual in https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-org-configurations

- Get number of commits for the release: `git log release-14.04..release-14.12 --format=%an|wc -l`

- Commits by contributor: `git log release-14.04..release-14.12 --format=%an|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn`

- Send an email to nix-dev to announce the release with above information. Best to check how previous email was formulated to see what needs to be included.

## Release schedule

Date | Event
--- | ---
2016-07-25 | Send email to nix-dev about upcoming branch-off
2016-09-01 | `release-16.09` branch and corresponding jobsets are created, change freeze
2016-09-30 | NixOS 16.09 released