Creating a Release

The DART releases are available on GitHub:

https://github.com/NCAR/DART/releases

The releases loosely follows the rules of semantic versioning with a v at the start, e.g. v9.10.11.

vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH

Given a version number vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment in the following way:
MAJORversion when you make incompatible API changes
MINORversion when you add functionality in a backwards compatible manner
PATCHversion when you make backwards compatible bug fixes.

You may want to use additional labels for pre-release or other code as extensions to the vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

Make sure your pull request is up-to-date with main before merging and creating a release.

To create a release on GitHub:

  1. Decide on a tag number following the convention vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH

  2. Update the CHANGELOG.rst with the tag and a brief desciption of the changes.

  3. Change the version in conf.py

  4. Merge into main

  5. Create a release on GitHub from the main branch, by clicking on Draft a new release

    draft-new-release

  6. Enter the tag number. Make sure the target branch is main.

  7. Give the release a title and description.

  8. Click publish to create the release.

For a major release or critical bug-fix releases, you may want to email the dart-users group.

Once the code has been merged into main and released, you can delete the feature-branch.