7.3 Making Releases

See Releases.

Various releases of a given packages are distinguished by their version numbers. Versions are usually made up by two or three decimal numbers, separated by periods. An officially released package ideally has two numbers, a pretest release often have either three numbers or two numbers immediately suffixed with a small case letter. Versions should be increasing as time goes, for example, acceptable successions might be:

     1.0
     1.1
     1.2
     1.2.1
     1.2.2
     1.2.3
     1.2.4
     1.3
     1.3.1
     1.4

or maybe:

     ...
     3.17
     3.17a
     3.17b
     3.17c
     3.18

A much simplified statement of the overall goal is that the following recipe should usually work, when one wants to install any GNU package on his Unix systems.

     % ftp gnu.org
     ftp> anonymous
     ftp> user@fully.qualified.domain
     ftp> binary
     ftp> cd pub/gnu
     ftp> get package-version.tar.gz
     ftp> bye
     % tar xfz package-version.tar.gz
     % cd package-version
     % cat README
     % ./configure
     % make check install

Of course, variations are endless for both maintainers and installers, but a nice goal is trying to prepare things so that the recipe above does something sensible, as stated.