[Qgis-developer] Four month cycle too fast

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Nathan,

On Thu, 19. Jun 2014 at 20:34:00 +1000, Nathan Woodrow wrote:
> > Um, but I've spoken to most of the debian, ubuntu, ubuntugis, windows
> > maintainers and they all agree with me - I think they already have don't a
> > good job to automated it a good deal, but it's still not fully automated
> > and therefore they are not comfortable with doing it again and again.  ;)

> Of course I don't want to create heaps of more work for people but if cutting
> a release is a hard process then it really creates a sticky point in all
> this.  We need to be able to release as easy as possible.

You realize that I was just talking about me.   I'm doing all of that - and
that's also why I became RM - because I did't a lot of the release (namely
packaging) anyway.  I just don't do OSX and the non-deb linux distributions.

And it's also not like a package is a huge amount of work and has tons of
manual steps.  I already automated it a great deal (otherwise I would probably
not stand a chance) - but you still have to manually checkout new branches,
wait for builds, wait for the uploads, on multiple platforms and machines - and
not of all of that works flawlessly (sometimes this, sometimes that and always
something new - you know...) and sometimes something is brought up that the
nightly builds didn't show.

Same with the nightly builds, most of the time they works nicely, but every now
and again there's something going wrong that you didn't predict.

Some stuff was improved however - like the disk space issues on our osgeo vm
that made building the debian/ubuntu packages a pain (move to a new host).   I
also finally came to setup a single VM to do the windows (nightly) building
(before I had it one two separate machines).

But didn't find the time to setup nightly release builds in case of news on the
release branch.  Neither for osgeo4w nor for a not yet existing debian
repository.

> What are the main problems/stoppers with having it fully automated?  Do we
> need resources, VMs for each platform, etc?

See above.  Essentially it's just time (some larger chunks and a lot of small
ones).
 

Jürgen

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