To make a release follow these steps. 1. Update configure.ac to intended version, commit. 2. make distcheck (for weston I do make distcheck TESTS= to avoid running the tests... most of the tests pass, but the xwayland one is flaky) 3. git tag -am 1.5.0 1.5.0 4. scp tarballs to /srv/wayland.freedesktop.org/www/releases on annarchy.freedesktop.org 5. Put SHA1 for tarballs and tagged commits in release announcement 6. Push configure.ac commits and tags. 7. Send out release announcement. 8. Get the release email URL from http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/ 9. Update releases.html in wayland-web with links to tarballs and release email. 10. Update topic in #wayland to point to release announcement For x.y.0 releases, also create the x.y branch. The x.y branch is for bug fixes and conservetive changes to the x.y.0 release, and is where we release x.y.z releases from. Creating the x.y branch opens up master for new development and lets new development move on. We've done this both after the x.y.0 release (to focus development on bug fixing for the x.y.1 release for a little longer) or before the x.y.0 release (like we did with the 1.5.0 release, to unblock master development early). The master branch configure.ac version should always be (at least) x.y.90, with x.y being the most recent stable branch. Stable branch configure version is just whatever was most recently released from that branch. For stable branches, we commit fixes to master first, then cherry-pick them back to the stable branch.