How do base commits get released?

[Joshua Root]

On 2018-11-3 02:09 , George Plymale II wrote:
> Thanks for explaining all that, Ryan! I really appreciate having some
> better insight into the release process. Makes a lot more sense now and
> I see that it's more work than I expected.
> 
> Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> writes:
> 
>> It would be good if we could make more frequent releases to get fixes out there, even if they're smaller or not super critical. One reason we don't do this is because our release process involves a great deal of manual labor. I hope to automate more of the process using our buildbot, but we're not there yet.
> 
> I'm curious; what parts could be easily automated? The whole release
> process sounds a bit tedious as it is currently. It'd be nice to know
> what could possibly be improved by members of the community.

It really isn't that manual or tedious. Most of the time I spend
building a release is waiting for 10 VMs to load up and then run 'port
pkg MacPorts'. One script syncs, builds, and copies the pkg to a central
location with the correct name.

The manual parts are ensuring that we have all the commits we want
cherry-picked, tagging the release, signing the packages, and uploading
the release files to GitHub.

There are also release-adjacent tasks like news posts.

- Josh