[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Questions

[Jonathan Marsden]

On 12/2/2010 11:58 AM, Matthew Talbert wrote:

> I believe that daily builds will be very helpful for module 
> developers especially, plenty of whom use Ubuntu. Also, there is 
> considerable minor work being done in Xiphos right now, small
> changes and fixes to the display in relation to a huge number of
> modules being created for a large organization. The daily builds will
> be helpful (and already have been) for this project.

(1) Weekly or so is insufficient for them?  Why?

(2) Most users, module creators or otherwise, do not want to deal with
finding new bugs in new code written/committed in the last 24 hours.
Why shouldn't module creators expect to receive at least somewhat tested
applications, just as other users do?

But, OK, if daily builds are actually needed, and that piece of the
automation on LP currently does things oddly, then we can and perhaps
should do automated builds daily (only if the upstream VCS codebase
changed that day, obviously) on our own machines, using 'normal' package
build processes rather than an approach that is (as yet)
incomplete/strange and creates packages in a slightly different way.

BTW, I have been making "daily" SWORD source tarballs available whenever
the svn changes for quite a while now.  A smallish bash script run from
cron on my crosswire.org account is all it takes.  I've not touched that
setup for over a year -- it just works.  I'm not against making very
recent code available to those with the skills and expertise to work
with it (in that new and untested state).  However, I am not at all sure
we should operate on the basis that SWORD module creators want (or
expect) to be testers of very new code.  They just need tools that work
reliably.

Jonathan