Managing releases

Before you attempt to make releases, you should already be familiar with the the basics of CVS. You will need to adhere to the version number scheme and naming conventions for branches and tags for Drupal contributions.

If nothing else, please read the two page hand-out about maintaining releases that describes the essentials and best practices in condensed form.

Introduction to releases

At some point while developing your module, theme, or translation, you will probably declare the project formally "done enough" and choose to contribute it to the community, so that they can download it from the Download section for their given Drupal version. This process is called creating a release of your project.

All releases of drupal.org projects are generated based on either a CVS tag or branch. Each release is only packaged for download and available as a version number in the issue queue once you have created a release node for it. Also, please note that you must create a project node before you add any CVS tags or branches to your contribution, or you will run into errors when you try to add the release nodes.

NB - Stable releases NEVER get updated after they have been created for the first time. If anyone does this, then it is irresponsible and creates all sorts of issues. Please see the Fixing releases section below for more information.

The following sections contain information on how to create releases for your projects. You may also want to refer to the Module CVS reference or Theme CVS reference for information on CVS commands you will need to use, and the overview of version numbers, tags, and branches.