This document describes the tasks the Org-mode maintainers have to do and how they are performed.
Org development is the work of volunteers only and we cannot promise to follow a release schedule.
We use the same numbering convention than semantic versioning, but we don't follow the rules of SemVer, as expressed in semver.org.
A major release (e.g. 10
) means: "Hear ye, hear ye! All users should
pay attention and read the release notes before upgrading!".
A minor release (e.g. 10.1
) means: "Hear ye, hear ye! Power users and
Org contributors shoul pay attention and read the release notes before
upgrading! All other users are welcome to read them too."
Note that this de facto convention has been made explicit after 9.4
.
Note that before Org 9.5
, versions like 9.3
, 9.4
, etc. were really
/major/ ones. This was confusing for some users, especially those who
expect Org to follow semantic versioning conventions.
The git repository has two branches:
Bug fixes always go on maint
then are merged on master
.
New features always go on master
.
When doing a major or minor release, we make sure that all changes from the maint branch are merged into the the master branch, then merge the master branch back into maint to synchronize the two.
When doing a bugfix release, we do it from the maint branch directly.
When doing a major and a minor release, after all necessary merging is done, tag the maint branch for the release with:
git tag -a release_9.1.7 -m "Adding release tag"
and push tags with
git push --tags
We also encourage you to sign release tags like this:
git tag -s release_9.1.7 -m "Adding release tag"
Log on the orgmode.org server as the emacs user and cd
to ~/git/org-mode
.
From there do
make release make upload
to create the =.tar.gz= and =.zip= files, the documentation, and to upload everything at the right place.
There are two cron tasks on the server: one that builds the ELPA
packages and one that builds org-latest.tar.gz
and org-latest.zip
.
ELPA packages are built from the maint branch. One ELPA package contains Org's core, another one called "org-plus-contrib" contains Org and contributed libraries.
org-latest*
snapshots are built from the master branch.
Below it is described how Org is kept in sync with the upstream Emacs.
Sometimes Emacs maintainers make changes to Org files. The process of propagating the changes back to the Org repository is called /backporting/ for historical reasons.
To find changes that need to be backported from the Emacs repository,
the following git
command, courtesy of Kyle Meyer, can be used:
git log $rev..origin/emacs-25 -- lisp/org doc/misc/org.texi \ etc/refcards/orgcard.tex etc/ORG-NEWS etc/org \ etc/schema/od-manifest-schema-v1.2-os.rnc \ etc/schema/od-schema-v1.2-os.rnc
here, $rev
is the last commit from the emacs-25
branch that was
backported. The should also be done for the master
branch.
There is also a feed to keep track of new changes in the =lisp/org= folder in the Emacs repository.
New releases of Org should be added to the Emacs repository.
Typically, Org can be synchronized by copying over files from the
=emacs-sync= branch of the Org repository to the master
branch of
Emacs repository. The emacs-sync
branch has a few extra changes
compared with the maint
branch. If the Emacs maintainers are
planning a new release of Emacs soon, it is possible that another
branch should be used.
If the new release of Org contains many changes, it may be useful to
use a separate branch before merging, e.g. scratch/org-mode-merge
.
This branch can then be merged with the master
branch, when
everything has been tested.
Please see CONTRIBUTE in the Emacs repository for guidelines on contributing to the Emacs repository.
The following list shows where files in Org repository are copied to in the Emacs repository, folder by folder.
org-mode/doc
org.texi
emacs/doc/misc
. It may be necessary to replace,orgcard.tex
emacs/etc/refcards
. Make sure thatorg-mode/etc
styles/*
emacs/etc/org
.schema/*.rnc
emacs/etc/schema
.schema/schemas.xml
ORG-NEWS
emacs/etc
org-mode/lisp
*.el
files to emacs/lisp/org
, except org-loaddefs.el
!org-version.el
in emacs/lisp/org
. The file isorg-mode/testing
emacs/etc/NEWS
Whenever a new (major) version of Org is synchronized to the Emacs repository, it should be mentioned in the NEWS file.
Load the mk/eldo.el
file then M-x eldo-make-doc RET
.
This will produce an org file with the documentation.
Import this file into worg/doc.org
, leaving the header untouched
(except for the release number).
Then commit and push the change on the worg.git
repository.
The maintainers needs to keep track of copyright assignments. Even better, find a volunteer to do this.
The assignment form is included in the repository as a file that you
can send to contributors: request-assign-future.txt
The list of all contributors from who we have the papers is kept on this Worg page, so that committers can check if a patch can go into the core.
The assignment process does not always go smoothly, and it has
happened several times that it gets stuck or forgotten at the FSF.
The contact at the FSF for this is: copyright-clerk AT fsf DOT org
Emails from the paper submitter have been ignored in the past, but an email from the maintainers of Org mode has usually fixed such cases within a few days.