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For any release, there should be a release branch. This branch should be In the past, this branch has been created by the appropriate "svn copy" command from trunk. For example:
svn copy https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/manifoldcf/trunk https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/manifoldcf/branches/release-0.6-branch
See below for a description of some automated scripts that do this job now.
A major release will have its own release branch labeled with the release number (e.g. "release-0.6-branch"). A minor release will continue in the appropriate major release branch, and have the required changes pulled up from trunk one at a time. Thus 0.6.1 would be released from "release-0.6-branch" also.
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Release Process 