4.6.1 release process proposal

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Nick Schermer wrote:
> I don't see how building tarballs can be a burden. If you script this
> a bit your pc is done somewhere in 15 ~ 30 minutes, while you sit and
> drink coffee, same for tagging.

But you can't really do it that way.  Releasing a new version works 
roughly like this for each package (assuming no problems):

1.  Bump package version
2.  Bump library dependencies (if it depends on other Xfce libs)
3.  Rerun autogen and do make distcheck.
4.  Test package.
5.  Commit version bump.
6.  Tag package.

You can't really do much of this in parallel because of #2, and, 
frankly, I wouldn't trust a script to run through all of these steps.

> The real thing that takes time is testing the whole thing, make sure
> you don't release crap.

Yup!

> For that reason I don't think a good testing
> system is unrelated: I we _know_ trunk/branch dist-checks without
> problems on various platforms, making a release is _a lot_ easier.

Maybe it's not completely unrelated, but I don't want to make huge 
changes at once.  I'm talking about a change to release methodology that 
can be done with or without an added testing framework.  My change is 
orthogonal to it.  If we want to discuss a testing system, great, but 
let's do that separately.

	-brian