The "Standard" tarball is the one that contains only the code needed to build and install Lire. It doesn't contain required libraries like expat or XML::Parser. There is also a "Full" version of the tarball that includes those libraries.
Procedure 15.2.
Start from a fresh copy by running the command make maintainer-clean-recursive in the directory where you checked out Lire's source code.
Make sure that there are no tarballs in the extras subdirectory.
Set the version and prepare the source tree by running the command ./bootstrap. (You can overwrite the pre-cooked version by doing e.g. echo `date +%Y%m%d`-R-f-jvb-1 > VERSION . Make sure your version hasn't got too many characters. Non-GNU tar chokes on too long pathnames in the archive.)
Generate Makefiles
Run ./configure
Build Lire and create the tarball by running the command make distcheck.
This will build a tarball lire-version.tar.gz and then makes sure that the content of this tarball can be build and installed. If that command fails, Lire isn't ready to be released. Fix the errors before making the release.
Sign Lire's tarball with you public key. To do this with GnuPG, run gpg --detach-sign --armor lire-version.tar.gz.
A file lire-version.tar.gz.asc will get created. Publish this file, together with the tarball. Now, people downloading the tarball can verify its integrity by downloading the .asc along with it, as well as your public key, and by running gpg --verify lire-version.tar.gz.asc .