Thanks everyone who replied. There was a lot of email on this thread, so I'm going to write a quick summary.
There are concerns that this would increase the support load on organizational helpdesks that support AFS internally, and on the OpenAFS community overall. There are concerns that generating the packages (at least on Windows) will dramatically increase the build time on the buildbot slaves. Windows binaries go through a manual signing and registration process, so the additional developer dependencies there may make it infeasible to do fully automated packages for Windows at all right now. It's important to identify these snapshot builds as "not official". This must be clear to the user before they install it, and clear to the support staff after the software has been installed. The web interface for downloads must have big warning signs, and from a support perspective, we should use unique version strings accessible by "rxdebug -v" or "fs version" etc. There are concerns about how to do version numbers for these snapshots. I did some research and it looks like we were setting version numbers of "9.9.9" back when we had nightly CVS snapshots. Those were just source tarballs though, so they weren't as accessible to the casual user as what we're talking about. And this wouldn't really work well for nightly builds since the date value wouldn't be encoded in the binaries. Ben pointed out that whatever version numbering scheme we use should be cross-platform so it can align with package managers where possible. Simon pointed out it would be nice to extend the build testing to packaging so that package maintainers could still catch the necessary packaging changes (eg. when new files appear). This would probably need to be balanced against the other factors. ----- I think a good next step would be to decide how we should handle version numbers in snapshot packages. For example: should configure.ac in the 1_6_x branch contain something like "1.6.2" or "1.6.2git" right now, and a build script could tack on a date or git hash to that number every night? I'm open to writing patches to the "build-tools/git-version" script, or otherwise. - Ken _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
