How to make a patch release

update changelog

• anything that has been backported, copy over its what's new entry from doc/changes/latest.inc on main into a new patch release section in doc/changes/X.Y.inc on maint/X.Y branch. The new section for the patch release should mirror the structure of the minor release notes, i.e., for patch release Z add something like this to the top of doc/changes/X.Y.inc:

  .. _changes_X_Y_Z:
  
  Version X.Y.Z (YYYY-MM-DD)
  --------------------------
  
  Bugs
  ----
  - Fix bug in the ``.whatever()`` where something was wrongly computed for some inputs (:gh:`00000` by `Some Contributor`_)

To get the content for this, the towncrier stubs should have been backported as well, so you can do for example:

towncrier build --draft >> doc/changes/v1.7.rst
rm doc/changes/devel/*.rst

Then move the contents from the bottom of v1.7.rst to the v1.7.1 section and add the Authors list manually.

check stable website

• If the most recent commit to the stable branch wasn't deployed, push an empty commit to deploy it: git commit --allow-empty -m '[circle deploy]'. Check CircleCI that it succeeds (use the branch dropdown to select the appropriate branch, e.g., maint/1.2).

update the version string

• In pyproject.toml change version = "X.Y.Z" to X.Y.Z+1

update codemeta and citation

• run cd tools/ && python generate_codemeta.py && cd - to update the codemeta metadata and CITATION.cff files for this release, and stage them: git add codemeta.json CITATION.cff

commit and push

• If you have been committing along the way, squash your commits. Otherwise commit all changes made so far
• Push to upstream maint/X.Y (or merge in your "prep for patch release" PR)

make a release tag

• Use the GitHub feature "Releases" to make a new release. Use vX.Y.Z for all fields (version number, name, description), otherwise they get auto-populated with annoying things. The "target" of the release should be maint/X.Y.

package for PyPI

This is taken care of by .github/workflows/release.yml.

package for Conda

• Update conda-forge/mne-feedstock. This will eventually happen automatically (example here, but you can speed things up by opening a manual pull request. At a minimum, you must update version and sha256 in recipe/meta.yaml and set build to 0 if it's not already; other additions will depend on what has changed for the project (e.g., minimum dependency versions). You can get the sha sum from sha256 dist/mne-X.Y.Z.tar.gz (with X.Y.Z subsituted for the real version number, of course).

update MNE Installers

• Update MNE Installers. Here is an example PR
• Update documentation links to installers. Change button links doc/install/installers.rst to point to the new installer files. Make sure to update links for all 3 platforms. Push this change to both maint/X.Y and main, with commit message [circle deploy].