The release criteria for libdrm is essentially "if you need a release, make one". There is no designated release engineer or maintainer. Anybody is free to make a release if there's a certain feature or bug fix they need in a released version of libdrm. When new ioctl definitions are merged into drm-next, we will add support to libdrm, at which point we typically create a new release. However, this is up to whoever is driving the feature in question. Follow these steps to release a new version of libdrm: 1) Ensure that there are no local, uncommitted/unpushed modifications. You're probably in a good state if both "git diff HEAD" and "git log master..origin/master" give no output. 2) Bump the version number in configure.ac. We seem to have settled for 2.4.x as the versioning scheme for libdrm, so just bump the micro version. 3) Run autoconf and then re-run ./configure so the build system picks up the new version number. 4) (optional step, release.sh will make distcheck for you, but it can be heart warming to verify that make distcheck passes) Verify that the code passes "make distcheck". Running "make distcheck" should result in no warnings or errors and end with a message of the form: ============================================= libdrm-X.Y.Z archives ready for distribution: libdrm-X.Y.Z.tar.gz libdrm-X.Y.Z.tar.bz2 ============================================= Make sure that the version number reported by distcheck and in the tarball names matches the number you bumped to in configure.ac. 5) Commit the configure.ac change and make an annotated tag for that commit with the version number of the release as the name and a message of "libdrm X.Y.Z". For example, for the 2.4.16 release the command is: git tag -a 2.4.16 -m "libdrm 2.4.16" 6) Push the commit and tag by saying git push --tags origin master assuming the remote for the upstream libdrm repo is called origin. 7) Use the release.sh script from the xorg/util/modular repo to upload the tarballs to the freedesktop.org download area and create an annouce email template. The script takes one argument: the path to the libdrm checkout. So, if a checkout of modular is at the same level than the libdrm repo: ./modular/release.sh libdrm This copies the two tarballs to freedesktop.org and creates libdrm-2.4.16.announce which has a detailed summary of the changes, links to the tarballs, MD5 and SHA1 sums and pre-filled out email headers. Fill out the blank between the email headers and the list of changes with a brief message of what changed or what prompted this release. Send out the email and you're done!