We shoot for a release every month or so - that will generally just increment the middle version number (e.g. 1.6.1 -> 1.7). We're getting to the point where a 2.0 release would be reasonable, though - a lot has changed since 1.0.
Minor releases are reserved for bug fixes (in general no new features or deprecations) - they only happen in cases where there is a critical bug in a recently released version, or when a release has no new features or API changes.
In between releases we use a "+" version number to denote the version under development. So if we just released 1.6, then the current dev version would be 1.6+. When we make the next release (1.6.1 or 1.7) we replace all instances of 1.6+ in the docs with the new version number.
Changes should be backwards compatible unless absolutely necessary. When making API changes the approach is generally to add a deprecation warning but keeping the existing API functional. Eventually (after at least ~4 releases) we can remove the old API.
- Test release on Python 2.4-2.7 on Windows, Linux and OSX, with and without the C extension. Generally enough to just run the tests on 2.4 and 2.7 with and without the extension on a single platform, and then just test any version on the other platforms as a sanity check. python setup.py test will build the extension and test. python tools/clean.py will remove the extension, and then nosetests will run the tests without it. Can also run the doctests: python setup.py doc -t. For building extensions on Windows check section below.
- Add release notes to doc/changelog.rst. Generally just summarize/clarify the git log, but might add some more long form notes for big changes.
- Search and replace the "+" version number w/ the new version number (see note above).
- Make sure version number is updated in setup.py and pymongo/__init__.py
- Commit with a BUMP version_number message.
- Tag w/ version_number
- Push commit / tag.
- Push source to PyPI: python setup.py sdist upload
- Push binaries to PyPI; for each version of python and platform do: python setup.py bdist_egg upload. Probably best to do python setup.py bdist_egg first, to make sure the egg builds properly. Notably on the Windows machine, for Python 2.4 and 2.5, you will have to run python setup.py build -c mingw32 bdist_egg upload or the C extension build will fail with an error about Visual Studio 2003. On Windows we also push a binary installer. The setup.py target for that is bdist_wininst.
- Make sure the docs have properly updated (driver buildbot does this).
- Add a "+" to the version number in setup.py/__init__.py, commit, push.
- Announce!
Currently the default python setup.py test builds extensions on Windows 32 bit only. The default option requires Visual Studio (C++ Express) 2008 and works with Python 2.6 and 2.7. The tests can be run in Python 2.4 and 2.5 by installing MingW32 and running the appropriate command in step 3 below.
- On your Windows 32 bit machine install Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition (or equivalent 2008 edition) in the default location. For Python 2.4 or 2.5 install MingW32 in it's default location.
- Ensure you have nose installed.
- Run pathtoPython2(6|7) setup.py test or pathtoPython2(4|5) setup.py build -c mingw32 test to build the C extensions and run pymongo tests.