Internal releases are currently created 2 or 3 times a week from a script run at INRIA. This script packages together the current versions of all packages into a tar file and then sends a mail to cgal-develop. People responsible for running the test suite can pick it up automatically using the autotest_cgal script (Section 5.6).
A public release can be created from an internal release by following the steps detailed in the README file in the package Release on the SVN server. This file describes how to create the code, the documentation and the updated web pages for a new release.
Each public release is tagged on the SVN server with a tag in the following format CGAL_N_release, where N is the release number with all `.'s replaced by `_'s (e.g., for release 3.0, the tag is CGAL_3_0_release. There is also a branch created for each release with the name CGAL_N_branch, where N is the release number as before. This facilitates the creation of bug fix releases.