Preparing Releases

Task list

• Go through all PR for the milestone
• Update Changelog
• Start a release branch
• (If needed) Revert whatever unintentional API/ABI breakage that might have occurred in the release branch
• Bump version to x.x.x in CMakeLists.txt
• Find replace all occurrences of x.x.x.99 CMake requirements in the tutorials and examples
• Try to build and test on all relevant platforms
• Finalize changelog and fix the release date
• Tag
• Remove the release branch
• Add binaries to the GitHub release page.
• Add link doc link to tutorials page
• Bump version to x.x.x-dev in CMakeLists.txt
• Send announcements to the mailing lists
• Throw a party!

Creating the Change Log

Tool written for Python 3.

$ python3 change_log.py -h
usage: change_log.py [-h] [--username USERNAME] [--cache [FILE] | --from-cache
                     [FILE]]
                     start [end]

Generate a change log between two revisions. Check
https://github.com/PointCloudLibrary/pcl/wiki/Preparing-Releases#creating-the-
change-log for some additional examples on how to use the tool.

positional arguments:
  start                The start (exclusive) revision/commit/tag to generate
                       the log.
  end                  The end (inclusive) revision/commit/tag to generate the
                       log. (Defaults to HEAD)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help           show this help message and exit
  --username USERNAME  GitHub Account user name. If specified it will perform
                       requests with the provided credentials. This is often
                       required in order to overcome GitHub API's request
                       limits.
  --cache [FILE]       Caches the PR info extracted from GitHub into a JSON
                       file. (Defaults to 'pr_info.json')
  --from-cache [FILE]  Uses a previously generated PR info JSON cache file to
                       generate the change log. (Defaults to 'pr_info.json')```

Shipping Binaries

Mac OSX

Ship only modules enabled by default. Assume only the following optionals: existence of VTK and OpenGL support

• Go to CMakeLists.txt and comment out all section regarding RPATH setup (we should allow this to be specified with CMAKE).
• Configure

$ cmake .. -DCPACK_GENERATOR="TBZ2" \
           -DCPACK_PACKAGE_FILE_NAME="pcl-1.x.x-darwin"
           -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
           -DPCL_ENABLE_SSE=OFF \
           -DWITH_CUDA=OFF \
           -DWITH_DAVIDSDK=OFF \
           -DWITH_DOCS=OFF \
           -DWITH_DSSDK=OFF \
           -DWITH_ENSENSO=OFF \
           -DWITH_FZAPI=OFF \
           -DWITH_LIBUSB=OFF \
           -DWITH_OPENGL=ON \
           -DWITH_OPENNI=OFF \
           -DWITH_OPENNI2=OFF \
           -DWITH_PCAP=OFF \
           -DWITH_PNG=OFF \
           -DWITH_QHULL=OFF \
           -DWITH_QT=OFF \
           -DWITH_RSSDK=OFF \
           -DWITH_VTK=ON
$ make -j package
# and pray your system doesn't run out of memory