======Milestones to 4.6======

The release process is overseen by our release manager [[stephan@xfce.org|Stephan Arts]]. If you want to step in and help with preparing parts of the releases don't hesitate to contact him.

**Release process:**
  - Send mail to xfce4-dev@xfce.org mailing-list 2 days before tagging.
  - NEWS files
    * Ask module maintainers to update their NEWS in svn
    * Create HTML release notes for website from NEWS files
  - Make sure the application actually compiles and that 'make distcheck' works; commit build fixes as needed
  - Update ChangeLogs (only for module maintainers who use svn2cl)
  - Bump version numbers (drop 'svn' tag)
  - Rebuild po/*.po to update Project-Id-Version and prevent problems during make distcheck.
  - Tag the release in svn
  - Make release packages
    * .tar.bz2 of each module (create with 'make distcheck')
    * "Fat" tarball of all .tar.bz2 modules
    * GUI installer package
  - Generate MD5 and SHA1 checksums, and GPG signatures for each module
  - Upload tarballs (only tar.bz2) to main server (request mirror maintainers to do a manual sync) and Sourceforge
  - Release announcements/websites:
    * xfce.org main page
    * Freshmeat
    * Gnomefiles
    * Slashdot  (only for 4.x.0 releases)
    * OSNews
    * ??

**After the release:**

  - Celebrate
  - (For stable releases) Update the csm misquote in #xfce-dev
  - (Possibly a lot more I can't think of right now)