The Libevent Release Checklist

I wrote up this document as a checklist of stuff to do before putting out a Libevent release.

Part 1: Before the release

Look at CI, currently the following is covered:
- Linux (ubuntu)
- OpenBSD
- FreeBSD
- Windows
- OSX
Run make dist and make sure it generates a good distribution. You can make sure that it does by running make distcheck.
Make sure all APIs are documented in libevent book and in the doxygen comments. This is especially important for alpha, beta, and rc releases, where new APIs are born.

Generate the changelog using changelog.py
Document highlights in whatsnew-2.2.txt (actually this is a duplication of information, shouldn't we use libevent book instead?)
Update the credits using update-contributors.sh
Increment the version number and version string in configure.in. The next version should be 2.0.18-stable; the numeric version should be 0x02001200 (That is, 02 00 12 00 : the first three bytes are the version number, and the final 00 byte means that this is the actual release of 2.0.18, not some development version between 2.0.18 and 2.0.19.)
Increment the libtool VERSION_INFO in Makefile.am. See Makefile.am for full instructions on what to do in other cases.
Increment the versions in CMakeLists.txt.
Run make distcheck again to make sure nothing above messed us up. Do this one on the system with the most up-to-date autotools you have.
Upload the resulting tarball somewhere volatile; tell people to try it out.

Once the tarball is tested, it's time to put out the release.

Tag the release. I do this with git tag -u 165733ea ${NEW_TAG}
Push the tag to the origin. This is done with git push origin tag ${NEW_TAG}
Publish the release on github and add there:
- tarball and signature to github.
  - gpg --detach-sign -a /path/to/.tar.gz (key should be trusted and default key for gpg)
- list of contributors (actually it should be not just a list, but contributions itselfs)
  - This can be done using Generate release notes content for a release API
Add a link on the website and on the old releases page.
~~Send an announcement to libevent-users~~
~~Increment the version in the IRC channel topic by telling chanserv set #libevent topic Welcome to #libevent! The latest release is ${NEW_TAG}.~~

Increment the versions in configure.in to ${NEW_TAG}-dev, and increment the version numbers there to 0x02001201. The "-dev" and "01" mean that we are a development version, not the released version.
Add a new empty section for the next version to the ChangeLog.