11 Release Types

Software releases can be categorized by their release type, such as ‘stable’, ‘alpha’, etc. Tarballs of different release types normally go to different destinations. In order to make the release process more convenient, grayupload provides a mechanism for selecting the destination URL by the release type.

This works as follows. Destination locations supplied with the to and url configuration statements are prefixed (qualified) with the release type, as in:

to stable=ftp.gnu.org:myproject
to alpha=alpha.gnu.org:myproject

There are no predefined release types, it is up to the user to define as many of them as needed. A valid release type name must begin with an alphabet letter or underscore, and contain letters, digits, underscores or dashes.

When calling grayupload, you can either supply the actual release type with the --release-type (-t) option in the command line, or let the program determine it from the version number automatically.

grayupload --release-type=stable myproject-1.0.tar.gz

When invoked this way, grayupload scans each destination and selects only those of them, which are qualified with that release type (‘stable’, in this case).

Both qualified and unqualified destinations can be listed together in the configuration.

The exact matching rules are:

1. Unqualified destinations always match.
2. Qualified destinations match only if the release type is determined (either using the --release-type option, or derived from the version number) and its value matches the destination qualifier.