On Sun, 11 Feb 2007, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:
Um, speaking as a Gentoo user, that's last bullet is a strange statement.
The problem seems to be that you guys seem to be building from *head* on some
huge number of projects (I say seem to be because I just wound up having to
give up trying to get sugar installed due to broken builds). That would
require very high discipline on all of the projects to make it work.
If you had your build environment use a tag/revision in the source control
system for each project and only update the version used when your core
developers *know* that the new version has built and run on a couple of dozen
boxes you'd have a far greater chance of getting new developers built without
problems. In short, you'd have a testing tag and a stable tag for each
component.
Someone who just wants to use the environment (i.e. almost *all* new
developers) could then build the stable tags, someone who wants to work with
the latest and greatest could use the testing tags and contribute to the
testing of them by their building. When everyone is building head in all
these projects, by contrast, you are basically having every new developer
build a different piece of software, with no idea whether what they are
building is actually usable. Given that new developers are *new*, and thus
unlikely to know whether they are seeing a failure in their usage or the code
itself, knowing that what they are trying to do is *possible* is a great help
for them.
Sure, someone might get code that's 2 or 3 weeks out of date, but if they are
working on a particular module, they'd set their tag to "HEAD" for that piece
and be on the bleeding edge for that piece.
+1. Especially since this is precisely what Sugar users end up
replicating -- the hard way. I'm building Sugar in its entirety, every
day, and whenever I find a build that "works", I use it for a while.
Requires some additional overhead to determine what Sugar builds are
stable, of course -- and when you're moving rapidly in HEAD, that can be
difficult.
--g
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Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Project || fedoraproject.org
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