On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 05:22, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Ultimately, the frequency of releases comes down to the burden on the release manager and the folks that build the binary installers. Any given RM is usually only responsible for one or two branches, but the same two people (Martin and Ronald) typically build the Windows and Mac OS X binaries for all of them. So if you add 2.6 and 3.1 together, as well as the releases for 2.7 and 3.2 development, I think you'll find releases happening a lot more often than an average of 1 every 4 months.

Right, the effort of those people is obviously the limiting factor here. Automating builds sounds like a good step forward. What are the sticky bits here? Martin, Ronald, how much of the process is not automated, and why is automating hard? Cheers, Dirkjan

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 14:09, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

I don't feel like producing a complete list of build steps; the entire process takes about four hours.

So is most of this scripted, or is there just a process in your head?

The steps that are difficult to automate are: - code signing - testing the resulting installer - uploading

Why are those steps difficult to automate? I'd think that uploading is just some ftp commands. Signing might be a thing because you don't want the keys distributed. Testing the resulting installer could probably be automated in part, and people could still download the nightlies to do more testing.

However, in a significant number of releases, some of the build steps failed, so it requires some investigation to find the source of the problem.

Well, sure, but if we do continuous builds we find failures like that sooner. Cheers, Dirkjan

"Martin v. Löwis" writes:

People will never ever test nightly builds. Been there, done that. Instead, the nightly build process will break, and nobody will fix it for months (or even complain, for that matter).

Certainly seems to be past experience. I know Martin knows this, but for other readers who may not, my Windows XP buildbot built nightly windows installers (the basic MSI package, close but not necessarily a fully signed new release as Martin makes) starting in September, 2007. It ran successfully for about 6 months, at which point it started to fail fairly consistently. Nobody noticed, and Martin and I finally just shut it down in December, deciding it wasn't worth the effort to try to fix. My OSX buildbot has been building nightly DMG images (though again, I suspect Ronald has a few extra steps beyond what its doing for a full release) since April. I'd actually be interested in knowing if anyone is using them - I suspect perhaps not. In both cases, getting the process going actually took quite a bit of effort (even stuff like having to fix the buildbot upload code in the Windows case), not just on my part, but with the help of Martin and Ronald. But without actual use of the result, it's hard to think it was worth it. I'm pretty sure my default reaction to a break-down in the current OSX build process at this point would be to first suggest disabling it unless there were real users. -- David