| --- |
| short-description: Creating releases |
| ... |
| |
| # Creating releases |
| |
| In addition to development, almost all projects provide periodical |
| source releases. These are standalone packages (usually either in tar |
| or zip format) of the source code. They do not contain any revision |
| control metadata, only the source code. |
| |
| Meson provides a simple way of generating these. It consists of a |
| single command: |
| |
| ninja dist |
| |
| This creates a file called `projectname-version.tar.xz` in the build |
| tree subdirectory `meson-dist`. This archive contains the full |
| contents of the latest commit in revision control including all the |
| submodules. All revision control metadata is removed. Meson then takes |
| this archive and tests that it works by doing a full compile + test + |
| install cycle. If all these pass, Meson will then create a SHA-256 |
| checksum file next to the archive. |
| |
| **Note**: Meson behaviour is different from Autotools. The Autotools |
| "dist" target packages up the current source tree. Meson packages |
| the latest revision control commit. The reason for this is that it |
| prevents developers from doing accidental releases where the |
| distributed archive does not match any commit in revision control |
| (especially the one tagged for the release). |
