Great idea, worth the pain! On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Andrzej Szeszo <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi All > > The project is moving forward very slowly. I my opinion one of the main > reasons behind it is lack of unified distribution build system. > > Previous releases were put together manually. Probably one or two core > contributors would be be able to repeat the whole process at this point > without investing significant amount of time into learning how things fit > together. We need distribution release and publishing process to be > automated and repeatable. > > There is a significant amount of bug reports in OpenIndiana bug tracker. > Many of bugs require very simple changes to get fixed. URL updates or > branding updates for example. Many contributors are more than capable of > fixing such bugs. Because it is not clear what goes where, and also how to > build and then test things many contributors simply don't bother looking at > bugs at all. > > I am proposing creating a unified distribution build system. A system that > would build the whole distribution after issuing a single "make publish" or > similar command. > > Having such system will let us to release early, release often. It should > improve the development progress in general. Bugfixes and security updates > would get integrated in no time. New users would have an easy start. We > could point new contributors at the build system and simply ask them to > start hacking. Having all consolidations referenced from a single build > system would make it clear to them where things go. Base system changes, > etc. - core consolidations, new software - add-on consolidation directory, > and so on. > > Continuous build system could be implemented using the same tools on the > OpenIndiana build machines, including the SPARC ones. > > Many people will say that this is not possible and that even Oracle is not > doing it. I say such system is possible but will require significant amount > of work and significant amount of time to prepare. It will be worth the > effort if done right. All major open source OS distributions have the > release process automated in one way or another. I think this is the key to > our success. Splitting the build and release engineering process between > consolidation maintainers/owners based on Oracle model proved to not to work > well for us. > > I would like to start a dialog between the core contributors about such > build system. Discuss whether it is needed or not. And if the decision is > made that it is needed - discuss requirements, technical details and then > actually implement it! > > Andrzej > > _______________________________________________ > oi-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/oi-dev >
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