Release Process#

The release manager role in TVM means you are responsible for a few different things:

  • Preparing release notes

  • Preparing your setup

  • Preparing for release candidates

    • Cutting a release branch

    • Informing the community of timing

    • Making code changes in that branch with necessary version updates

  • Running the voting process for a release

    • Creating release candidates

    • Calling votes and triaging issues

  • Finalizing and posting a release:

    • Updating the TVM website

    • Finalizing release notes

    • Announcing the release

Prepare the Release Notes#

Release note contains new features, improvement, bug fixes, known issues and deprecation, etc. TVM provides monthly dev report collects developing progress each month. It could be helpful to who writes the release notes.

It is recommended to open a Github issue to collect feedbacks for the release note draft before cutting the release branch. See the scripts in tests/scripts/release for some starting points.

Prepare the Release Candidate#

There may be some code changes necessary to the release branch before the release. Ensure all version numbers are up to date

Prepare the GPG Key#

You can skip this section if you have already uploaded your key.

After generating the gpg key, you need to upload your key to a public key server. Please refer to https://www.apache.org/dev/openpgp.html#generate-key for details.

If you want to do the release on another machine, you can transfer your gpg key to that machine via the gpg --export and gpg --import commands.

The last step is to update the KEYS file with your code signing key https://www.apache.org/dev/openpgp.html#export-public-key. Check in the changes to the TVM main branch, as well as ASF SVN,

# the --depth=files will avoid checkout existing folders
svn co --depth=files "https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/tvm" svn-tvm
cd svn-tvm
# edit KEYS file
svn ci --username $ASF_USERNAME --password "$ASF_PASSWORD" -m "Update KEYS"
# update downloads.apache.org (note that only PMC members can update the dist/release directory)
svn rm --username $ASF_USERNAME --password "$ASF_PASSWORD" https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/tvm/KEYS -m "Update KEYS"
svn cp --username $ASF_USERNAME --password "$ASF_PASSWORD" https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/tvm/KEYS https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/tvm/ -m "Update KEYS"

Cut a Release Candidate#

To cut a release candidate, one needs to first cut a branch using selected version string, e.g.,

git clone https://github.com/apache/tvm.git
cd tvm/
# Replace v0.6.0 with the relevant version
git branch v0.6.0
git push --set-upstream origin v0.6.0

(Make sure the version numbers in the source code are correct. Run python3 version.py to update the version.)

Go to the GitHub repositories “releases” tab and click “Draft a new release”,

  • Provide the release tag in the form of v1.0.0.rc0 where 0 means it’s the first release candidate. The tag must match this pattern v[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.rc[0-9] exactly!

  • Select the commit by clicking Target: branch > Recent commits > $commit_hash

  • Copy and paste release note draft into the description box

  • Select “This is a pre-release”

  • Click “Publish release”

Notice that one can still apply changes to the branch after the cut, while the tag is fixed. If any change is required for this release, a new tag has to be created.

Remove previous release candidate (if applied),

git push --delete origin v0.6.0.rc1

Create source code artifacts,

# Replace v0.6.0 with the relevant version
git clone git@github.com:apache/tvm.git apache-tvm-src-v0.6.0
cd apache-tvm-src-v0.6.0
git checkout v0.6
git submodule update --init --recursive
git checkout v0.6.0.rc0
rm -rf .DS_Store
find . -name ".git*" -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf
cd ..
brew install gnu-tar
gtar -czvf apache-tvm-src-v0.6.0.rc0.tar.gz apache-tvm-src-v0.6.0

Use your GPG key to sign the created artifact. First make sure your GPG is set to use the correct private key,

$ cat ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf
default-key F42xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Create GPG signature as well as the hash of the file,

gpg --armor --output apache-tvm-src-v0.6.0.rc0.tar.gz.asc --detach-sig apache-tvm-src-v0.6.0.rc0.tar.gz
shasum -a 512 apache-tvm-src-v0.6.0.rc0.tar.gz > apache-tvm-src-v0.6.0.rc0.tar.gz.sha512

Update TVM Version on main#

After cutting a release candidate, make sure to update the version numbers throughout main. For example if we are releasing v0.10.0 we want to bump the version numbers throughout the codebase from v0.10.dev0 to v0.11.dev0. An example of how to do this can be found here: https://github.com/apache/tvm/pull/12190. Tag the commit on main immediately after the last one included in the release branch with the dev tag (e.g. v0.11.dev0) for the next release. This tag is necessary so that the nightly packages built from main have the correct version number.

Upload the Release Candidate#

Edit the release page on Github and upload the artifacts created by the previous steps.

The release manager also needs to upload the artifacts to ASF SVN,

# the --depth=files will avoid checkout existing folders
svn co --depth=files "https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/tvm" svn-tvm
cd svn-tvm
mkdir tvm-v0.6.0-rc0
# copy files into it
svn add tvm-0.6.0-rc0
svn ci --username $ASF_USERNAME --password "$ASF_PASSWORD" -m "Add RC"

Call a Vote on the Release Candidate#

The first voting takes place on the Apache TVM developers list (dev@tvm.apache.org). To get more attention, one can create a GitHub issue start with “[VOTE]” instead, it will be mirrored to dev@ automatically. Look at past voting threads to see how this proceeds. The email should follow this format.

  • Provide the link to the draft of the release notes in the email

  • Provide the link to the release candidate artifacts

  • Make sure the email is in text format and the links are correct

For the dev@ vote, there must be at least 3 binding +1 votes and more +1 votes than -1 votes. Once the vote is done, you should also send out a summary email with the totals, with a subject that looks something like [VOTE][RESULT] ….

In ASF, votes are open at least 72 hours (3 days). If you don’t get enough number of binding votes within that time, you cannot close the voting deadline. You need to extend it.

If the vote fails, the community needs to modify the release accordingly: create a new release candidate and re-run the voting process.

Post the Release#

After the vote passes, to upload the binaries to Apache mirrors, you move the binaries from dev directory (this should be where they are voted) to release directory. This “moving” is the only way you can add stuff to the actual release directory. (Note: only PMC can move to release directory)

export SVN_EDITOR=vim
svn mkdir https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/tvm
svn mv https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/tvm/tvm-v0.6.0-rc2 https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/tvm/tvm-v0.6.0

# If you've added your signing key to the KEYS file, also update the release copy.
svn co --depth=files "https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/tvm" svn-tvm
curl "https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/tvm/KEYS" > svn-tvm/KEYS
(cd svn-tvm && svn ci --username $ASF_USERNAME --password "$ASF_PASSWORD" -m"Update KEYS")

Remember to create a new release TAG (v0.6.0 in this case) on Github and remove the pre-release candidate TAG.

git push --delete origin v0.6.0.rc2

Update the TVM Website#

The website repository is located at https://github.com/apache/tvm-site. Modify the download page to include the release artifacts as well as the GPG signature and SHA hash. Since TVM’s docs are continually updated, upload a fixed version of the release docs. If CI has deleted the docs from the release by the time you go to update the website, you can restart the CI build for the release branch on Jenkins. See the example code below for a starting point.

git clone https://github.com/apache/tvm-site.git
pushd tvm-site
git checkout asf-site
pushd docs

# make release docs directory
mkdir v0.9.0
pushd v0.9.0

# download the release docs from CI
# find this URL by inspecting the CI logs for the most recent build of the release branch
curl -LO https://tvm-jenkins-artifacts-prod.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tvm/v0.9.0/1/docs/docs.tgz
tar xf docs.tgz
rm docs.tgz

# add the docs and push
git add .
git commit -m "Add v0.9.0 docs"
git push

Afterwards, modify the downloads page to support the latest release. An example of how to do this is here.

Post the Announcement#

Send out an announcement email to announce@apache.org, and dev@tvm.apache.org. The announcement should include the link to release note and download page.