FEX tagged version (release) process

A FEX tagged version happens near the start of each month.

The tagged versioning is FEX-<YYMM> with the month being the current month.

If a tagged version was being done on Sun, 02 Jan 2022 then the FEX version would be FEX-2201

There are multiple locations that need to be updated during a release

• Github tagged release

• Github releases page

• fex-emu.com blog post

• https://launchpad.net/~fex-emu/+archive/ubuntu/fex Ubuntu PPA

• @FEX_Emu twitter account

• Optional: Update the rootfs images

Github Steps

• Check out the commit that will be the branch

  $ git checkout upstream/main

• Make local main branch be the selected commit

  $ git branch -D main $ git checkout -b main

• Run the release script

  $ Scripts/generate_release.sh

• Push the branches upstream

  • This requires administrative push rights
  • Both the tag and the main branch needs to be committed

  $ git push upstream $CURRENT $ git push upstream main

Launchpad PPA steps

Follow the steps in: https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX-ppa/blob/main/README.md

• Requires PPA GPG key signing access
• Wait the 20-30 minutes for Ubuntu PPA to build and publish the binaries

Github releases page Steps

• Requires administrative rights
• Go to https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/releases
• Click Draft a new release
• Copy and paste the tagged changelog in to the draft release markdown
  • This was generated from the generate_release.sh script
• Clean the markdown to a desired level of combining and ordering
  • Fairly trivial cleanups, it's more just a developer focused changelog
• Click publish release

fex-emu.com blog post steps

• clone https://github.com/FEX-Emu/fex-emu.com
• Copy the previous post from the _posts/ folder to a new markdown file
  • Ensure correct date format in filename
• Copy github release pages markdown in to this
• Easy to forget areas:
  • Title text section
  • See Release notes top section, links to github release tag
  • See detailed changelog at the bottom, linking to github raw revision comparison
• Short blurb in the top paragraph if desired
• push new md file to the repo. Either in direct push or PR
• Jekyll will automatically regenerate the website with a github action
• Verify that the post shows up on the site at fex-emu.com

@FEX_Emu twitter account steps

• Requires @FEX_Emu twitter account access
• Create a tweet with some small blurb/sizzle text about some relevant changes in this tagged version
• Link to the fex-emu.com blog post about the change

RootFS image updating

• This doesn't typically need to be done on a monthly basis

• This lives in https://github.com/FEX-Emu/RootFS

• Follow the Build_Data file's information for how to generate an image using build_image.py

  • This gives a squashfs image for the rootfs

• Use FEXRootFSFetcher <image.sqsh> to generate the xxhash for the image

• Update https://rootfs.fex-emu.com/file/fex-rootfs/RootFS_links.json with the new rootfs image and hash

  • This currently lives in a private FEX-Emu backblaze bucket with cloudflare servicing it.
  • Never publicly give the direct backblaze link to the file. Will cause BW costs to skyrocket
  • Always pass through cloudflare

• Upload new image to Backblaze using the b2 upload tool

  • b2 upload-file <bucketname> <image.sqsh> <Image folder name>/<image.sqsh>

• Upload the new RootFS_links.json

  • Lives in the root of the bucket
  • b2 upload-file <bucketname> RootFS_links.json RootFS_links.json

• Once uploaded it should propagate immediately

• Might be worth thinking about the coherency problem of updating the hash versus image independently if overwriting an image

  • Need to be careful about it to not break anyone in the process of downloading an image