How to make a release

Update files

Update the NEWS.txt and move the old stuff in the HISTORY.txt file. To update the NEWS.txt file, check all ticket closed for this release and all commit log messages. Update the Theano/doc/index.txt News section.

Update the “Vision”/”Vision State” in the file Theano/doc/introduction.txt.

Update the file .mailmap to clean up the list of contributor.

Get a fresh copy of the repository

Clone the code:

git clone git@github.com:Theano/Theano.git Theano-0.X

It does not have to be in your PYTHONPATH.

Update the version number

Theano/doc/conf.py should be updated in the following ways:

  • Change the upper copyright year to the current year if necessary.

Update the year in the Theano/LICENSE.txt file too, if necessary.

NEWS.txt usually contains the name and date of the release, change them too.

Update the fallback version in theano/version.py.

Update the version in doc/install_generic.inc.

Update the code and the documentation for the theano flags warn.ignore_bug_before to accept the new version. You must modify the file theano/configdefaults.py and doc/library/config.txt.

Tag the release

You will need to commit the previous changes, tag the resulting version, and push that into the original repository. The syntax is something like the following:

git commit -m "Modifications for 0.X.Y release" setup.py doc/conf.py NEWS.txt HISTORY.txt theano/configdefaults.py doc/library/config.txt
git tag -a rel-0.X.Y
git push
git push --tags

This will trigger and build and upload of the conda package to the mila-udem channel.

The documentation will be automatically regenerated in the next few hours.

Generate and upload the package

On PyPI

Set your umask to 0022 to ensure that the package file will be readable from other people. To check your umask:

umask

To set your umask:

umask 0022

Finally, use setuptools to build the release:

python setup.py sdist --formats=gztar

Then use twine to upload the release

twine upload dist/Theano-1.0.X.tax.gz

This command uploads the package on pypi.python.org. To be able to do that, you must register on PyPI (you can create an new account, or use OpenID), and be listed among the “Package Index Owners” of Theano.

There is a bug in some versions of distutils that raises a UnicodeDecodeError if there are non-ASCII characters in NEWS.txt. You would need to change NEWS.txt so it contains only ASCII characters (the problem usually comes from diacritics in people’s names).

On mloss.org (for final releases only)

Project page is at http://mloss.org/software/view/241/. Account jaberg is listed as submitter.

  1. log in as jaberg to mloss

  2. search for theano and click the logo

  3. press ‘update this project’ on the left and change

  • the version number

  • the download link

  • the description of what has changed

  1. press save

Make sure the “what’s changed” text isn’t too long because it will show up on the front page of mloss. You have to indent bullet lines by 4 spaces I think in the description.

You can “update this project” and save lots of times to get the revision text right. Just do not change the version number.

Update documentation server scripts

The documentation server runs the auto-generation script regularly. It compiles the latest development version and puts it in $webroot/theano_versions/dev/. It then checks if the release branch has been updated and if it has, the release documentation is updated and put into $webroot/theano/. Finally, it checks for archived versions in $webroot/theano_versions/ and generates a versions.json file on the server that is used to populate the version switcher.

If the release branch has changed, you must update the web server script. Login to the deeplearning.net server as the user in charge of document generation. In the shell script ~/bin/updatedocs, update the variable release to the branch name for the current release.

You can also add previous releases to the versions documentation archive. In the script ~/bin/updatedocs_versions, change the variable Versions to the git tag of the documentation version to generate, then run the script.

Announce the release

Generate an e-mail from the template in EMAIL.txt, including content from NEWS.txt.

For final releases, send the e-mail to the following mailing lists:

For release candidates, only e-mail:

  • theano-announce

  • theano-dev

  • theano-users

For alpha and beta releases, only e-mail:

  • theano-dev

  • theano-users