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Release Process

Meta: There should always be a single release engineer to disambiguate responsibility.

Pre-release

Check all of the following:

All dependencies have been updated as appropriate:
- BDB
- Boost
- ccache
- libgmp
- libsnark (upstream of our fork)
- libsodium
- miniupnpc
- OpenSSL

A. Define the release version as:

$ ZCASH_RELEASE=MAJOR.MINOR.REVISION(-BUILD_STRING)

Example:

$ ZCASH_RELEASE=1.0.0-beta2

Also, the following commands use the ZCASH_RELEASE_PREV bash variable for the previous release:

$ ZCASH_RELEASE_PREV=1.0.0-beta1

B. create a new release branch / github PR

B1. update (commit) version in sources

doc/README.md
src/clientversion.h
configure.ac
contrib/DEBIAN/control
contrib/gitian-descriptors/gitian-linux.yml

In configure.ac and clientversion.h:

Increment CLIENT_VERSION_BUILD according to the following schema:
- 0-24: 1.0.0-beta1-1.0.0-beta25
- 25-49: 1.0.0-rc1-1.0.0-rc25
- 50: 1.0.0
- 51-99: 1.0.0-1-1.0.0-49
- (CLIENT_VERSION_REVISION rolls over)
- 0-24: 1.0.1-beta1-1.0.1-beta25
Change CLIENT_VERSION_IS_RELEASE to false while Zcash is in beta-test phase.

B2. write release notes

git shortlog helps a lot, for example:

$ git shortlog --no-merges v${ZCASH_RELEASE_PREV}..HEAD \
    > ./doc/release-notes/release-notes-${ZCASH_RELEASE}.md

Update the Debian package changelog:

export DEBVERSION='1.0.0-rc1'
export DEBEMAIL="${DEBEMAIL:-team@z.cash}"
export DEBFULLNAME="${DEBFULLNAME:-Zcash Company}"

dch -v $DEBVERSION -D jessie -c contrib/DEBIAN/changelog

B3. change the network magics

If this release breaks backwards compatibility, change the network magic numbers. Set the four pchMessageStart in CTestNetParams in chainparams.cpp to random values.

B4. merge the previous changes

Do the normal pull-request, review, testing process for this release PR.

C. Verify code artifact hosting

C1. Ensure depends tree is working

https://ci.z.cash/builders/depends-sources

C2. Ensure public parameters work

Run ./fetch-params.sh.

D. make tag for the newly merged result

In this example, we ensure master is up to date with the previous merged PR, then:

$ git tag -s v${ZCASH_RELEASE}
$ git push origin v${ZCASH_RELEASE}

E. deploy testnet

Notify the Zcash DevOps engineer/sysadmin that the release has been tagged. They update some variables in the company's automation code and then run an Ansible playbook, which:

builds Zcash based on the specified branch
deploys it as a public service (e.g. betatestnet.z.cash, mainnet.z.cash)
often the same server can be re-used, and the role idempotently handles upgrades, but if not then they also need to update DNS records
possible manual steps: blowing away the testnet3 dir, deleting old parameters, restarting DNS seeder

Then, verify that nodes can connect to the testnet server, and update the guide on the wiki to ensure the correct hostname is listed in the recommended zcash.conf.

F. publish the release announcement (blog, zcash-dev, slack)

G. celebrate

missing steps

Zcash still needs:

deterministic or reproducible builds
thorough pre-release testing (presumably more thorough than standard PR tests)
release deployment steps (eg: updating build-depends mirror, deploying testnet, etc...)
proper Zcash-specific versions and names in software and documentation.

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