Ok, we ran binaries today, finally.
To those of who wonder what happens, it basically works like this. We have a master
build server which sends out messages to the machines on the build farm. This message
has information such as where to get the files, how to build AbiWord, what build
number to give it, how to make packages, and so on and so forth. This master system
than creates files of lf, crlf, and cr format for the different systems. These system
then each try to build. If any one of them fails, we have to start the whole process
over. Doing so requires varying levels of effort, depending on what happened.
Could this system be improved upon? Probably. Needless to say, though, it's a pain
to run it. Particularly when every iteration has to wait for dog slow Be boxes to
finish.
Anyway, to make a long story short, everything looked ready to go, and are tests
builds ran everywhere. Then, when we went through the supposedly routing step of
creating 0.7.11, the FreeBSD failed to create the static tar.gz file. I am not sure
why, nor do I know why it started happening recently. If you want to help AbiWord,
here is what to do: Try to do a "make distribution" on FreeBSD, and figure out why it
fails.
I know I promised to have something by today, but it didn't happen. I will try again
tomorrow, and perhaps decide to release without Solaris OR FreeBSD. So, for at least
one more day, the tree must remain closed. If you have a fix for Solaris or FreeBSD,
by all means you can sneak that in. I will let everyone know what we intend to do in
about 16 hours. Feel free to offer your opinions.
Robert Sievers
Your unsuccessful servent
