We shoot for a release every few months - that will generally just increment the middle version number (e.g. 2.1.1 -> 2.2).
Minor releases are reserved for bug fixes (in general no new features or deprecations) - they only happen in cases where there is a critical bug in a recently released version, or when a release has no new features or API changes.
In between releases we use a "+" version number to denote the version under development. So if we just released 2.1, then the current dev version would be 2.1+. When we make the next release (2.1.1 or 2.2) we replace all instances of 2.1+ in the docs with the new version number.
Changes should be backwards compatible unless absolutely necessary. When making API changes the approach is generally to add a deprecation warning but keeping the existing API functional. Eventually (after at least ~4 releases) we can remove the old API.
- Test release on Python 2.4-2.7 and 3.1-3.3 on Windows, Linux and OSX, with and without the C extension. Generally enough to just run the tests on 2.4, 2.7 and 3.3 with and without the extension on a single platform, and then just test any version on the other platforms as a sanity check. python setup.py test will build the extension and test. python tools/clean.py will remove the extension, and then nosetests will run the tests without it. Run the replica set and mongos high-availability tests with PYTHONPATH=. python test/high_availability/test_ha.py and the slow tests with nosetests -d test/slow. Can also run the doctests: python setup.py doc -t. For building extensions on Windows check section below.
- Add release notes to doc/changelog.rst. Generally just summarize/clarify the git log, but might add some more long form notes for big changes.
- Search and replace the "+" version number w/ the new version number (see note above).
- Make sure version number is updated in setup.py and pymongo/__init__.py
- Commit with a BUMP version_number message.
- Tag w/ version_number
- Push commit / tag.
- Push source to PyPI: python setup.py sdist upload
- Push binaries to PyPI; for each version of python and platform do:python setup.py bdist_egg upload. Probably best to do python setup.py bdist_egg first, to make sure the egg builds properly. Notably on the Windows machine, for Python 2.4 and 2.5, you will have to run python setup.py build -c mingw32 bdist_egg upload or the C extension build will fail with an error about Visual Studio 2003. On Windows we also push a binary installer. The setup.py target for that is bdist_wininst.
- Make sure the docs have properly updated (driver buildbot does this).
- Add a "+" to the version number in setup.py/__init__.py, commit, push.
- Announce!