Hi Dave,
On Feb 5, 2008, at 6:01 AM, Dave wrote:
Some more thoughts about milestone builds...
For a variety of reasons, making a final and official release can take
months. This can make life difficult for developers who are trying to
roll out new features on a monthly basis. And it provides limited
opportunities for folks to test new features as they are developed.
Sure, anybody can create a build at any time and test it, but if that
build is not tagged they have no fixed target against which to report
bugs.
To solve these problems, I'm proposing that we start the practice of
making "milestone" builds available. A milestone build should be made
after a significant chunk of development work as been done. This could
happen several times during the development of new version of Roller,
perhaps once a month but never more often than once a month.
Other projects call these builds snapshot releases. There is even
infrastructure in place to support snapshot releases in maven, for
example.
* Tagged in SVN
+0 It's not obvious that this improves our ability to track down
issues. If it only shows up on a milestone build and not after, does
it matter?
* Released informally via people.apache.org
+1 For example, on ~snoopdave/milestones/
* Intended only for testing
+1
* NOT an official release
+1 We have to be careful about the naming of the artifacts to make
this clear.
* NOT supported by migration scripts, etc.
+0
So, question #1 is: is this a good idea, i.e. does it solve the
problems I identified and should those problems be solved.
And question #2 is will it work, i.e. does ASF policy allow milestone
builds as described above.
As long as the build is not distributed via mirrors, it's just a
build. So don't publish the build on dist, only on someone's
private-public_html on people.apache.org.
And can we streamline the voting process so
that it does not take months to also get a milestone release out. How
can we streamline the process? One way is to NOT require a formal vote
for milestone buildand instead just use lazy consensus.
Don't even vote. Just publish it.
It would be nice to have some automated extended testing run against
the milestones so people get an idea of whether the build is really
broken.
Craig
Once we start
requiring a vote, we can get into long delays. But will that fly with
ASF policy? Another way is to make the milestone builds automatic,
i.e. decide that we spin a tagged build on the 1st of every month.
Any ideas?
- Dave
Craig Russell
Architect, Sun Java Enterprise System http://java.sun.com/products/jdo
408 276-5638 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.S. A good JDO? O, Gasp!
