I finally cajoled maint.mk into actually making a stable release of GNU Zile.
There are a couple of odd things about the final stages: 1. It doesn't upload the release tarball &c. itself, it emits commands to do so. Why? 2. There's no post-release hook which I can use for my Freshmeat announcement (AFAICS). 3. It doesn't send the email itself, it emits an email. I can see one reason for this, namely, it leaves a "FIXME: Insert comments". There are a couple of other odd things about the message, which I reproduce below for convenience. First, it has a line from make at the start and end; I presume this is a bug? Secondly, what's the <#secure method=pgpmime mode=sign> bit? I presume this is something to do with signing which I've not seen before? It doesn't seem to be documented. Thirdly, why "./NEWS" and not "NEWS"? It seems this is very close to total automation. I would make a couple of suggestions: 1. Remove the FIXME. Instead, move the NEWS extract above the boilerplate. This puts what people most want to read at the top, and NEWS is a good place to write such comments in any case. 2. Rather than just writing a file, send the email. I suggest a default setting of "mail", with a commented-out setting that instead opens the mail message in Emacs's composer. (It's a pity that (AFAIK?) there's no standard GNU launch-URL command to simply open the user's configured mail composer.) In the default case you could add catting the message to the terminal. If you do this before uploading the distribution archive, then the prompt to type one's GPG passphrase also acts as an "OK? (Y/N)" point at which the maintainer can bail out. It's all about reducing the number of commands that have to be typed which are always the same. make[2]: Entering directory `/home/rrt/Software/zile-stable' To: info-...@gnu.org Cc: coordina...@translationproject.org, bug-z...@gnu.org Mail-Followup-To: bug-z...@gnu.org Subject: zile-2.3.23 released [stable] <#secure method=pgpmime mode=sign> FIXME: put comments here Here are the compressed sources: http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/zile/zile-2.3.23.tar.gz (909KB) Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]: http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/zile/zile-2.3.23.tar.gz.sig To reduce load on the main server, use a mirror listed at: http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html [*] You can use either of the above signature files to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this: gpg --verify zile-2.3.23.tar.gz.sig If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it: gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 80EE4A00 and rerun the `gpg --verify' command. This release was bootstrapped with the following tools: Autoconf 2.67 Automake 1.11.1 Gnulib v0.0-4982-ga6bd3da ./NEWS * Noteworthy changes in release 2.3.23 (2011-03-14) ** Bug fixes {beginning,end}-of-buffer now take account of transient-mark-mode (bug present since “forever”). ** Build-related Turn on more compiler and build system, and run-time checks (thanks, gnulib!). make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/rrt/Software/zile-stable'
