[rfc/help wanted] a nightly bzr package build

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Martin Pool wrote:
> 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.
> 

If the packaging branch is a direct clone of upstream bzr.dev, why not
use a numbering system like:

  bzr-1.X.Y~nightly<revno>-1~bazaar1

I don't know that ~nightly3696 will sort before b1, so maybe

~a3696 (for alpha).

alpha definitely downplays the real stability of it, but at least it
gets the sorting correct. And if the revno hasn't changed, I don't think
you need to be releasing *another* nightly. (Though perhaps some people
expect there to be a new date-based release?)

For 1.6 and 1.7, Lukas was kind enough to work with me in getting
bzr-builddeb up and running, which means we have the bulk of the whole
process already scripted.

I think this would, indeed, be fairly simple to set up. I don't think I
have the right hardware running 24x7 to set it up at home.

John
=:->
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