4.6.1 release process proposal

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:54:29 +0100 Nick Schermer wrote:

> I agree with Biju that creating packages in various environments is
> not a good idea. I think only 1 person should do this (and if Stephan
> has no time for this I wouldn't mind doing this), and building the
> release tarballs doesn't take long if we're sure trunk just build fine
> on various environments.
> So I'd say only 1 release manager who packs and releases the whole
> thing.

That pretty much defeats the main purpose of my proposal: take the
burden off the release manager.  Yes, I know, now you say you'll do it,
but when the time comes, will you actually have the time?  It's hard to
say.  You've disappeared for a while before, I have... we all probably
have at one time or another.

I don't see how building packages in different environments is a
problem.  Other -- larger -- projects, with many more modules, do this
all the time.  And every time the release manager changes, the packages
get built on a different system.

It just... doesn't matter.  Autotools generates a configure and
Makefile.in files (etc.) that are standalone -- you don't even need
autotools on the target system to build and install the package.  It is
entirely irrelevant if libxfcegui4-x.y.z.tar.bz2 is built on one system
and xfwm4-x.y.z.tar.bz2 is built on another.

> That said I do think our testing is a bit crap right now. Even with
> release tarballs we don't test them properly on multiple environments
> (like the xfce4-panel bug that appeared in non-linux installations),
> so maybe we can setup a buildbot system (Jannis already suggested
> this) that runs make dist-check on various osses (linux/*bsd/...) with
> most the debug flags enabled we previously discussed. If the buildbot
> passes everything w/o problems we can simply build the packages and
> release them without a lot of testing.

Yeah, this is a great idea, but it requires spare, dedicated hardware.
If people are willing to donate hardware, and place(s) to host them,
that's great.  The infrastructure to set this up is non-trivial as well.

I'd consider this a separate issue that we should tackle later.  One
thing at a time.

	-brian