mpv/DOCS/tech/release-howto.txt

How to make an MPlayer release
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

preparations:
- Ask the DOCS maintainers to commit their final changes, check if
  all docs are up to date, etc.
- Verify man page, remove obsolete options, mention new ones.
- Ask translation maintainers to update their help_mp*.h file.
- Update the ChangeLog file (according to CVS log), ask other developers
  to verify their parts, etc. Ask Diego to spellcheck it.
- Consult at -dev-eng about unstable parts of the code which should be
  disabled for the release.

create the release tree:
- cvs checkout the mplayer src tree
- if releasing from 'main', check out libavcodec from FFmpeg CVS
- remove the CVS subdirs:
    find main -name CVS -exec rm -rf {} \;
- remove the .cvsignore files:
    find main -name .cvsignore -exec rm {} \;
- remove obsolete DOCS translations, help files
- replace version.sh with this (change version number too...):

============
#!/bin/sh
echo "#define VERSION \"1.0pre5-$1 \"" > version.h
============

release the tree:
    cd ..
    mv main MPlayer-0.90rc5
    tar -cf MPlayer-0.90rc5.tar MPlayer-0.90rc5
    bzip2 -9 MPlayer-0.90rc5.tar

test it (download to your local machine, extract, compile, run)

copy to FTP:
    cp MPlayer-0.90rc5.tar.bz2 /home/ftp/MPlayer/releases/

move the older (pre)release(s) (except the last one before the current one)
to ../OLD_stuff/ dir

Somehow get Diego to write a news entry for the release, and update the
source file of dload.html and commit it. Test it, it's sometimes buggy
(broken links etc).

Done.