Release Process

Here the release process for Constellation is described.

Updating the Version and Code Name

Constellation roughly follows semantic versioning, i.e. MAJOR.FEATURE.PATCH. The major version should only be increased when incompatible changes are introduced, the feature version only when new features are added.

Note

Currently, Constellation is in a draft state at major version 0 and without patch releases. Incompatible changes may be introduced in any release until major version 1.

Each major and feature release of Constellation has a code name, chosen from the IAU designated constellations in order of increasing solid angle they take up in the sky.

The new version and code name need to be adjusted in the top-level meson.build file before the release.

Writing the Release Notes

The release notes need to be written in the website repository.

Note

The release notes should be published right after the release has been tagged the main repository.

Updating the Metadata

The metadata file located in docs/etc needs to be updated with a new release entry, which might look like:

<release version="0.3" date="2025-01-17">
  <url type="details">https://constellation.pages.desy.de/news/2025-01-17-Constellation-Release-0.3.html</url>
  <description>
    <p>Release of Constellation Sagitta</p>
  </description>
</release>

Note

The URL for the release notes needs to match with the prepared release notes.

Creating the Release

The release on GitLab is created when an annotated tag (git tag -s or git tag -m) is pushed. The tag has to follow the vMAJOR.FEATURE.PATCH naming scheme.

After the tag pipelines finished and the release is created on GitLab, the release should be edited to add the URL to the release notes as release asset.

Update Satellite Templates

After the release, the code of the satellite templates should be updated if there any breaking changes in the release.

Any changes to configuration files (such as .clang-tidy for example) in the main repository should be updated in the template repositories as well. This is also a good moment to update the pre-commit hooks.

For the Meson template, the wrap file located under subprojects/constellation.wrap should be updated to the new release.

Releasing on Flathub

The new release should be pushed to the Flathub repository. This is done by updating the URL in the manifest to the full source code from the GitLab release assets.