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Release Process

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

Pre-release

The following should have been checked well in advance of the release:

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

If this release changes the behavior of the protocol or fixes a serious bug, verify that a pre-release PR merge updated PROTOCOL_VERSION in version.h correctly.

Release process

Run the release script:

$ ./zcutil/make-release.py <RELEASE> <RELEASE_PREV>

Example:

$ ./zcutil/make-release.py v1.0.8-1 v1.0.9

B3. Generate release notes

Run the release-notes.py script to generate release notes and update authors.md file. For example:

$ python zcutil/release-notes.py --version $ZCASH_RELEASE

Add the newly created release notes to the Git repository:

$ git add ./doc/authors.md ./doc/release-notes/release-notes-$ZCASH_RELEASE.md

Update the Debian package changelog:

export DEBVERSION=$(echo $ZCASH_RELEASE | sed 's/-beta/~beta/' | sed 's/-rc/~rc/' | sed 's/-/+/')
export DEBEMAIL="${DEBEMAIL:-team@z.cash}"
export DEBFULLNAME="${DEBFULLNAME:-Zcash Company}"

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

(dch comes from the devscripts package.)

B4. 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.

B5. 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

Checkout master and pull the latest version to ensure master is up to date with the release PR which was merged in before.

Check the last commit on the local and remote versions of master to make sure they are the same.

Then create the git tag:

$ 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. Update the 1.0 User Guide

G. Publish the release announcement (blog, zcash-dev, slack)

G1. Check in with users who opened issues that were resolved in the release

Contact all users who opened user support issues that were resolved in the release, and ask them if the release fixes or improves their issue.

H. Make and deploy deterministic builds

Run the Gitian deterministic build environment
Compare the uploaded build manifests on gitian.sigs
If all is well, the DevOps engineer will build the Debian packages and update the apt.z.cash package repository.

I. Celebrate

missing steps

Zcash still needs:

thorough pre-release testing (presumably more thorough than standard PR tests)
automated release deployment (e.g.: updating build-depends mirror, deploying testnet, etc...)

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