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RELEASE.md

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Polkadot Release Process

Branches

  • release-candidate branch: The branch used for staging of the next release. Named like release-v0.8.26

Notes

  • The release-candidate branch must be made in the paritytech/polkadot repo in order for release automation to work correctly
  • Any new pushes/merges to the release-candidate branch (for example, refs/heads/release-v0.8.26) will result in the rc index being bumped (e.g., v0.8.26-rc1 to v0.8.26-rc2) and new wasms built.

Release workflow

Below are the steps of the release workflow. Steps prefixed with NOACTION are automated and require no human action.

  1. To initiate the release process:
  2. branch master off to a release candidate branch:
  • git checkout master; git pull; git checkout -b release-v0.8.26
  1. In the substrate repo, check out the commit used by polkadot (this can be found using the following command in the polkadot repo: grep 'paritytech/substrate' Cargo.lock | grep -E '[0-9a-f]{40}' | sort | uniq
  2. Branch off this substrate commit into its own branch: git branch -b polkadot-v0.8.26; git push origin refs/heads/polkadot-v0.8.26
  3. In the polkadot repository, use diener to switch to this branch: diener update --branch "polkadot-v0.8.26" --substrate. Update Cargo.lock (to do this, you can run cargo build and then ctrl+c once it finishes fetching and begins compiling)
  4. Push the polkadot release-v0.8.26 branch to Github: git push origin refs/heads/release-v0.8.26
  5. NOACTION: The current HEAD of the release-candidate branch is tagged v0.8.26-rc1
  6. NOACTION: A draft release and runtime WASMs are created for this release-candidate automatically. A link to the draft release will be linked in the internal polkadot matrix channel.
  7. NOACTION: A new Github issue is created containing a checklist of manual steps to be completed before we are confident with the release. This will be linked in Matrix.
  8. Complete the steps in the issue created in step 4, signing them off as completed
  9. (optional) If a fix is required to the release-candidate:
  10. Merge the fix with master first
  11. Cherry-pick the commit from master to release-v0.8.26, fixing any merge conflicts. Try to avoid unnecessarily bumping crates.
  12. Push the release-candidate branch to Github - this is now the new release- candidate
  13. Depending on the cherry-picked changes, it may be necessary to perform some or all of the manual tests again.
  14. If there are substrate changes required, these should be cherry-picked to the substrate polkadot-v0.8.26 branch and pushed, and the version of substrate used in polkadot updated using cargo update -p sp-io
  15. Once happy with the release-candidate, tag the current top commit in the release candidate branch and push to Github: git tag -s -m 'v0.8.26' v0.8.26; git push --tags
  16. NOACTION: The HEAD of the release branch will be tagged with v0.8.26, and a final draft release will be created on Github.

Security releases

Occasionally there may be changes that need to be made to the most recently released version of Polkadot, without taking every change to master since the last release. For example, in the event of a security vulnerability being found, where releasing a fixed version is a matter of some expediency. In cases like this, the fix should first be merged with master, cherry-picked to a branch forked from release, tested, and then finally merged with release. A sensible versioning scheme for changes like this is vX.Y.Z-1.