CI for stable apps

[Harald Sitter]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 4:33 PM, Scarlett Clark <sgclark at kubuntu.org> wrote:
>
>
> On 04/07/2015 04:21 AM, Loïc Grobol wrote:
>>
>> On 7 April 2015 at 09:37, Harald Sitter <sitter at kde.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> I have however been pretty much the only person
>>> adjusting things and packaging new things and writing tech around all
>>> this which worries me greatly.
>
> Pft, I was helping lots and packaged alot of the applications.

Indeed. I had no intention of lessening your work there.

There is however a disconnect between what mostly everyone does i.e.
package things once upstream throws out tarballs, with what I am doing
and everyone else should be doing as well i.e. packaging things ahead
of time and automate the hell out of everything else.

We still do not have apps 15.04 packages despite all the kf5 based
shebang being packaged and integrated. And I fear the reason for that
is not scheduling or anything it quite simply is that doing a release
is requiring too much time when it really should not. I said this the
last couple of times on IRC when someone was being down because of the
release effort: There should be no effort to be had. What should
happen is you tell the CI to prep an upload and the CI should merge
the correct branches into the correct landing branches and then build
the packages and upload them and orchestrate it such that builds don't
take 24 hours because launchpad's dep-wait-retry mechanic is running
on a schedule.
While this is on my todo it does have low priority right now, that
does however not exclude anyone else working towards this.

After all, that is the entire idea here:
1. CI all the things such that changes that require human tinkering
get smaller compared to bundle releases ultimately spreading out the
time investment over the development time of upstream's new version
rather than balling up every 3 weeks making people work overtime which
they then need
2. spend newly gained idle time on automating more things
3. have more idle time
4. ???
5. retire in the Caribbean and get drunk on rum

It does so because the present tools involved are largely organically
grown hacks

> But alas, yes
> KDE ci seems to have eaten me alive. Apologies. I will be back to help
> though when humanly possible.
> Scarlett