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Doing a matplolib release

A guide for developers who are doing a matplotlib release

  • Edit __init__.py and bump the version number

When doing a release

Testing

  • Run all of the regression tests by running the tests.py script at the root of the source tree.
  • Run unit/memleak_hawaii3.py and make sure there are no memory leaks
  • try some GUI examples, eg simple_plot.py with GTKAgg, TkAgg, etc...
  • remove font cache and tex cache from .matplotlib and test with and without cache on some example script
  • Optionally, make sure examples/tests/backend_driver.py runs without errors and check the output of the PNG, PDF, PS and SVG backends

Branching

Once all the tests are passing and you are ready to do a release, you need to create a release branch:

git checkout -b v1.1.x
git push git@github.com:matplotlib/matplotlib.git v1.1.x

On the branch, do any additional testing you want to do, and then build binaries and source distributions for testing as release candidates.

For each release candidate as well as for the final release version, please git tag the commit you will use for packaging like so:

git tag -a v1.1.0rc1

The -a flag will allow you to write a message about the tag, and affiliate your name with it. A reasonable tag message would be something like v1.1.0 Release Candidate 1 (September 24, 2011). To tag a release after the fact, just track down the commit hash, and:

git tag -a v1.0.1 a9f3f3a50745

Tags allow developers to quickly checkout different releases by name, and also provides source download via zip and tarball on github.

Packaging

  • Make sure the MANIFEST.in us up to date and remove MANIFEST so it will be rebuilt by MANIFEST.in
  • run git clean in the mpl git directory before building the sdist
  • unpack the sdist and make sure you can build from that directory
  • Use setup.cfg to set the default backends. For windows and OSX, the default backend should be TkAgg. You should also turn on or off any platform specific build options you need. Importantly, you also need to make sure that you delete the build dir after any changes to setup.cfg before rebuilding since cruft in the build dir can get carried along.
  • on windows, unix2dos the rc file
  • We have a Makefile for the OS X builds in the mpl source dir release/osx, so use this to prepare the OS X releases.
  • We have a Makefile for the win32 mingw builds in the mpl source dir release/win32 which you can use this to prepare the windows releases.

Release candidate testing

Post the release candidates tarballs to the matplotlib download page. If you have developer rights, you should see an “Upload a new file” section there.

Announcing

Announce the release on matplotlib-announce, matplotlib-users and matplotlib-devel. Include a summary of highlights from the CHANGELOG and/or post the whole CHANGELOG since the last release.