On 2018-11-3 02:09 , George Plymale II wrote: > Thanks for explaining all that, Ryan! I really appreciate having some > better insight into the release process. Makes a lot more sense now and > I see that it's more work than I expected. > > Ryan Schmidt <[email protected]> writes: > >> It would be good if we could make more frequent releases to get fixes out >> there, even if they're smaller or not super critical. One reason we don't do >> this is because our release process involves a great deal of manual labor. I >> hope to automate more of the process using our buildbot, but we're not there >> yet. > > I'm curious; what parts could be easily automated? The whole release > process sounds a bit tedious as it is currently. It'd be nice to know > what could possibly be improved by members of the community.
It really isn't that manual or tedious. Most of the time I spend building a release is waiting for 10 VMs to load up and then run 'port pkg MacPorts'. One script syncs, builds, and copies the pkg to a central location with the correct name. The manual parts are ensuring that we have all the commits we want cherry-picked, tagging the release, signing the packages, and uploading the release files to GitHub. There are also release-adjacent tasks like news posts. - Josh
