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Re: release engineering (was: Re: 1.6.0-rc4 up for signing/testing)

From: <kmradke_at_rockwellcollins.com>
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:55:33 -0500

"Hyrum K. Wright" <hyrum_wright_at_mail.utexas.edu> wrote on 03/18/2009
11:37:39 AM:
> On Mar 18, 2009, at 11:07 AM, Stefan Sperling wrote:
>
> > [Cc'ing dev@ to gather comments]
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 09:38:25AM -0500, Hyrum K. Wright wrote:
> >>
> >> On Mar 18, 2009, at 9:01 AM, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> >>> And only 3 months delay so far :)
> >>
> >> Sure, but it's a lot sooner than 1.5 was, so the 2nd derivative is
> >> negative. :)
> >>
> >>> This may be interesting to you, albeit not quite as applicable to
> >>> subversion as I'd like it to be:
> >>> http://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2009-release_engineering/
> >>
> >> Ooooo, I like it. Thanks!
> >
> > So, could some of this be applied to Subversion?
> >
> > The essence I think is this slide ("our release cycle is simply
> > a fine-tuning period"):
> >
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2009-release_engineering/mgp00017.html
> >
> > Because many advanced OpenBSD users run regularly provided snapshots
> > and update their systems routinely every so often, a lot of
> > regressions and bugs in new features are caught quickly, often long
> > before release time.
> >
> > A key point here is that making snapshots available makes it easy
> > for people to try out the current state of things. They don't have
> > to go through all the hassle of checking out trunk, compiling it,
> > and so on. We know that not many of our own users (especially Windows
> > users) don't want to bother with that.
> >
> > I don't think getting an infrastructure that automatically compiles
> > Subversion snapshots for download would be incredibly difficult.
> > It's more of a question of who has the time and will to set it up.
> > It could probably be integrated with the buildbots, since they are
> > already compiling and testing binaries anyway. Just add packaging.
> > Then we'd have regular builds known to pass the regression test suite
> > for some versions of at least Windows, Mac, and some Linux distros.
>
> When we were going through the 1.5 release cycle, I wrote a script to
> post nighly tarballs on orac. See http://svn.collab.
> net/repos/svn/trunk/tools/dist/nightly.sh

The biggest problem for 'normal' users using these (or other) snapshots
is the potential working copy incompatibilities between versions. I've
been caught numerous times saying "oh crap", after I mistakenly updated
a large working copy with a dev version of subversion.

Maybe the wc-ng stuff can help by making things more forwards and
backwards compatible, but I doubt that is even on the list of things
to address.

Don't get me wrong, I think nightly builds are a great idea, just
we can't expect people to consistently use them unless working
copy compatibility is enhanced.

`Kevin R.

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Received on 2009-03-18 17:55:54 CET

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