Release Process¶
The following documents the release process used with mcuboot.
Version numbering¶
MCUboot uses semantic versioning, where version numbers follow a MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format with the following guidelines on incremeting the numbers:
MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.
We add pre-release tags of the format MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-rc1.
Release Notes¶
Before making a release, be sure to update the docs/release-notes.md
to describe the release. This should be a high-level description of
the changes, not a list of the git commits.
Release Candidates¶
Prior to each release, tags are made (see below) for at least one release candidate (a.b.c-rc1, followed by a.b.c-rc2, etc, followed by the official a.b.c release). The intent is to freeze the code for a time, and allow testing to happen.
During the time between rc1 and the final release, the only changes that should be merged into master are those to fix bugs found in the rc and Mynewt metadata as described in the next section.
imgtool release¶
imgtool is released through pypi.org (The Python package index) and
requires that its version to be updated by editing
scripts/imgtool/__init__.py
and modifying the exported version:
imgtool_version = "X.Y.ZrcN"
where rcX
, aX
and bX
are accepted pre-release versions (just
numbers for final releases). For more info see:
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0440/#pre-releases
Mynewt release information¶
On Mynewt, newt
always fetches a versioned MCUBoot release, so after
the rc step is finished, the release needs to be exported by modifying
repository.yml
in the root directory; it must be updated with the
new release version, including updates to the pseudo keys
(*-(latest|dev)
).
Tagging and Release¶
To make a release, make sure your local repo is on the tip version by fetching from origin. Typically, the releaser should create a branch named after the particular release.
Create a commit on top of the branch that modifies the version number
in the top-level README.md
, and create a commit, with just this
change, with a commit text similar to “Bump to version
a.b.c”. Having the version bump helps to make the releases
easier to find, as each release has a commit associated with it, and
not just a tag pointing to another commit.
Once this is done, the release should create a signed tag:
git tag -s va.b.c-rcn
with the appropriate tag name. The releaser will need to make sure that git is configured to use the proper signing key, and that the public key is signed by enough parties to be trusted.
At this point, the tag can be pushed to github to make the actual release happen:
git push origin HEAD:refs/heads/master
git push origin va.b.c-rcn