Releasing

Releasing or deploying is the act of taking a bunch of code, bundling it up, and distributing it to users. It can take lots of forms, from copying a lot of individual files to a running server, to building a package and publishing it to a repository for users to download, or even creating some type of physical media and putting it in the mail. Getting software to this state of "done and shipped" has changed dramatically over the years. Where we used to hand friends copies of floppy disks (books like this used to come with 3.5-inch pieces of square plastic that contained software on them), we now visit websites to download software or more commonly, the website is the software itself. When you were shipping software on physical media (which people still do, especially in the video game and movie industries), you would deem software "gold" and that was the version that was burnt to disk and sent to customers. Now, more commonly, we release software to a server...