mpv/DOCS/release-policy.md

Release Policy

Every few months, a new release is cut off of the master branch and is assigned a 0.X.0 version number.

As part of the maintenance process, minor releases are made, which are assigned 0.X.Y version numbers. Minor releases contain bug fixes only. They never merge the master branch, and no features are added to it. Only the latest release is maintained.

The goal of releases is to provide stability and an unchanged base for the sake of Linux distributions. If you want the newest features, just use the master branch, which is stable most of the time, except sometimes, when it's not.

Releases other than the latest release are unsupported and unmaintained.

Release procedure

• Create branch release/0.X or cherry-pick commits to the relevant branch.

• Create and/or update the RELEASE_NOTES file.

• Create and/or update the VERSION file.

• Update DOCS/client-api-changes.rst (on major releases).

• Create tag v0.X.Y.

• Push branch and tag to GitHub.

• Create a new GitHub release using the content of RELEASE_NOTES related to the new version.

Release notes template

Here is a template that can be used for writing the RELEASE_NOTES file.

Release 0.X.Y
=============

Changes
-------

- List of changes.

Bug fixes
---------

- List of bug fixes.

New features
------------

- List of new features.

This listing is not complete. There are many more bug fixes and changes. The
complete change log can be viewed by running ``git log <start>..<end>`` in
the git repository.

Note that the "Release 0.X.Y" title should be removed when creating a new GitHub release.

When creating a new point release its changes should be added on top of the RELEASE_NOTES file (with the appropriate title) so that all the changes in the current 0.X branch will be included. This way the RELEASE_NOTES file can be used by distributors as changelog for point releases too.