Warning
This documentation needs work (as discussed during the Gothenburg sprint in 2011)
As a meta rule setting up issues in the tracker for items here may help not forgetting things. A set of todo files may also work.
Check and prioritize all issues for the release, postpone some if necessary, create new issues also as necessary. A meeting (or meetings) should be organized to decide what things are priorities, should go in and work for the release.
An important thing is to get the documentation into an up-to-date state!
at code freeze make a release branch using release-x.x.x in mercurial IMPORTANT: bump the pypy version number in module/sys/version.py and in module/cpyext/include/patchlevel.h, notice that the branch will capture the revision number of this change for the release; some of the next updates may be done before or after branching; make sure things are ported back to the trunk and to the branch as necessary
update pypy/doc/contributor.txt (and possibly LICENSE)
update README
change the tracker to have a new release tag to file bugs against
go to pypy/tool/release and run: force-builds.py /release/<release branch>
wait for builds to complete, make sure there are no failures
run pypy/tool/release/make_release.py, this will build necessary binaries and upload them to pypy.org
JIT: windows, linux, os/x no JIT: windows, linux, os/x sandbox: linux, os/x
write release announcement pypy/doc/release-x.y(.z).txt the release announcement should contain a direct link to the download page
update pypy.org (under extradoc/pypy.org), rebuild and commit
post announcement on morepypy.blogspot.com
send announcements to pypy-dev, python-list, python-announce, python-dev ...