All releases happen from the stable branch, while the dev branch is used for continuous development. Release artifacts and testing are done by GitHub Actions.

Major/Minor release

Handled by making the stable branch content the same as the one on dev. It could (and usually does) break API/ABI compatibility with previous versions.

git checkout dev
git checkout -b stable-merge
git merge stable -s ours
git checkout stable
git merge stable-merge --no-ff -m "Merge 'dev' branch into stable"
git diff dev      # no difference
git log           # commit history from dev is included
git branch -D stable-merge

Patch release

Patches needs to first land in dev branch and only then they can be cherry-picked to stable.

git cherry-pick <commit-in-dev>

This release is used for smaller patches that do not break the API/ABI.

Increment the version number

Increment the version number in meson.build in add a new commit for it in the stable branch.

Submit PR

Submit a new PR of your stable branch against origin/stable. If you have push access to origin, you should create another branch with a different name and submit anyway a PR for others to review.

Test that everything worked well

Tag related projects and use them

Pin to a release tag of rz-pipe in Dockerfile
Pin to a release tag of rz-ghidra in Dockerfile
Add new commit for these in the stable branch

Prepare release notes

Write useful release notes for the new release. They should not be too detailed but not even too high level. Finding the right balanace is hard. When done, attach them to the draft release in the GitHub UI.

Release

Test again that everything is generated correctly, things seem to be working well and then confirm the draft release in the GitHub UI.