[rfc/help wanted] a nightly bzr package build

[Martin Pool]

It might be nice to set up regular nightly builds of Bazaar (and
related bits) into Ubuntu packages, or packages for other systems for
that matter.  This would be an intermediate point between using trunk
and using only the release candidates.  Compared to trunk the
differences are not drastic but perhaps enough to get more testing at
an earlier stage: people will automatically get updated without
needing to pull from trunk, they'll get binary extensions
automatically built and up to date, and we will exercise aspects of
packaging not visible when running from a checkout (like installing
the docs.)

I'd be hoping that by doing this some of the problem reports we get at
the release-candidate stage would arrive earlier and so be fixed
sooner and with less disruption to our schedule.

I am hoping someone will step up and do this; it doesn't require
either large resources or a lot of time.

Here are some notes on how I'd do it, and I'd welcome someone either
doing it or making corrections to this plan:

 * Make a ~bzr-nightly-ppa team and ppa
 * Get a checkout of bzr.dev and within it the packaging branch for
say intrepid or hardy
 * Add an entry to the top of the changelog with the current date/time
appended to the version
 * Build and upload a source package to the ppa
 * Run the previous steps from a cron job

There might be a tool to do the relatively trivial parts of this
already, like parsing and updating the package changelog.  I haven't
looked yet.

This has a few shortcomings but perhaps it is easier to correct them later:

 * the version number in the packaging branch may be out of sync with
the one in the source tree, and the one shown by bzr --version
 * the built versions won't be saved anywhere - I guess we could have
a branch storing the automatic packaging releases and merge the
manually-mantained packaging branch into it; I'm not sure if that is
worthwhile as there will be no substantial changes
 * there may be no easy record of precisely what revision was packaged

If you get this going for something other than Ubuntu and need a place
to host the resulting packages or run the builds contact me.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>