[mapguide-internals] MapGuide Open Source 2.1 - where is thecontinuous integration system ????

[Tom Fukushima]

Hi Jason,

Comments inline...

Tom



-----Original Message-----
From: mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:mapguide-internals-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jason Birch
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2008 3:20 PM
To: mapguide-internals at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [mapguide-internals] MapGuide Open Source 2.1 - where is thecontinuous integration system ????

Tom,

We should be careful to distinguish between continuous builds (a development tool) and packaging (a user service). IMHO, packaging is a much more critical issue at this point.
>>> Continuous builds or builds of some sort are required for the packaging.  The two are required and if we are going to do builds, we should just do it right.  What's to be careful about here, let's set out what needs to be done (RFC), and do it.


Autodesk's resourcing issues had come up a couple times, but the potential disavowal of responsibility for packaging is news to me, and I would imagine most of the users on the public mailing lists.
>>> The build team here does all parts of the build and this includes packaging.

I think that by keeping the installer process closed source, Autodesk essentially committed to maintain the open source installer packages right from the start. Without installers you may have an open source application, but no chance of building a project/community.
>>> There is nothing being kept intentionally under wraps here.  Tim has always told me he's ready to give the scripts to anyone who needs them.

The mgos community may be strong enough to take on the challenge at this point, but I feel that some support from Autodesk (even if its just a list of files, registry keys, conf file setting, permissions, etc) is critical to moving the packaging process out as a community responsibility. I don't have the visual studio expertise to create the setup project, but I would be happy to take on the role of package creation for new MGOS releases if I can get some help setting this up.
>>> I would hope the community can take this on.  It's been over two years since our first release.  Scripts are available from Autodesk.

I don't know what to do about Linux packaging.  Without the adoption of the cmake build process, I have absolutely no interest in even looking at this.
>>> We have never packaged for Linux.  We've only provided the source tar package for that particular release.  It would be good to address this as well.

Jason