[Qgis-psc] Backporting?

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi Nathan,

On Wed, 05. Mar 2014 at 19:12:21 +1000, Nathan Woodrow wrote:
> What is the steps involved in a release?
 
> IMO it should not be hard for us to roll a release out, bug fix branch or
> not.

Not much.  Enhance scripts/release.pl a bit (I started with that already -
although I didn't want to leak that - to have an easy option to silently change
my mind ;)), for Windows rerun package.cmd for x86 and x86_64, upload the
package to osgeo4w, run the cgi to update the setup.ini, run creatensis.pl for
both archs to create the standalones, upload the standalone to qgis.org, unpack
the source on our build machine, run the stable-debian-build script to create
all the debian builds, upload the source packages to launchpad for the
ubuntugis build.

And hope that all that doesn't run out of disk space, hangs on launchpad for
hours and completes before someone finds another bug in the release, that could
have been easily spotted in the previous one (or master for that matter).

The idea to do a point release if the release branch changed, but didn't change
for a week or so makes sense to me.  And all of the above is essentially
already automated for the nightly builds and could work in the same way for the
point releases (although I didn't dare to fully automate release.pl yet).

But this comes up after each release, because the previous stage isn't tested
enough and hence the release branch gets a few early fixes that also find their
way into the packages (although there currently is no point release).

Meanwhile master quickly moves on and easy backports become rarer.   Although
the quicker release schedule also helps with keeping the releases closer to
master.  So that might not as true as it used to be.

The question just is if point releases in our quicker release schedule really
make sense and are stable enough to put tag on it claiming that they are.

Simply more testing before the release would also help making the releases
stabler and the need for bug fix release in between less pressing.



Jürgen

-- 
Jürgen E. Fischer         norBIT GmbH               Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
Dipl.-Inf. (FH)           Rheinstraße 13            Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
Software Engineer         D-26506 Norden               http://www.norbit.de
QGIS PSC member (RM)      Germany                      IRC: jef on FreeNode                         

-- 
norBIT Gesellschaft fuer Unternehmensberatung und Informationssysteme mbH
Rheinstrasse 13, 26506 Norden
GF: Jelto Buurman, HR: Amtsgericht Emden, HRB 5502