Re: Release, bindings (Was: svn commit: r12731 - trunk/notes)

On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 11:39:46AM -0700, Jani Averbach wrote:
> I would like to see that our release process mandate that we won't cut
> tarball from branch until 24-48h hours after the last merge.
>
> This way someone else has a fighting chance to test branch, and our
> smoke testers has time to kick in.
>
> At the moment, svntester runs unit tests for swig-pl and javahl, and
> verify that swig-py compiles and installs.

I'm not sure how I feel about this or the beta tarball thing.

a) How many people would really test the branch? I didn't think anyone
was running automated tests on the branches either.

b) Testing beta tarballs seems not very useful. This ignores that the
tarball production setup is fairly brittle. You guys are used to one
person doing it and doing it in a very controlled environment (I build
tarballs out of chroot that never does anything but build tarballs so
there aren't any unexpected changes to the release environment).

What I'd much rather see is, that we cut tarballs as though they were
releases and distribute them to developers for testing. When several
developers sign off on testing then we post them for everyone else.
I've always been thinking 3 or 4 developers.

While this cuts out anyone that just randomly wants to test, it isn't
based upon the presumption that if it's there people will test it. We
know who tested it. And presumeably we know what procedures they
followed to test it.

Additionally, I've wanted us to always produce multiple GPG signatures
for every release. One person's GPG key being compromised shouldn't be
sufficient to sign a hacked release. As things stand now if my key was
ever compromised so are most of the releases we've made (or at least we
can't be assured that they aren't).

-- 
Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org
"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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