On 2013-12-04 20:52, Brad Roberts wrote:
I'm not sure this is really a good goal any more. The overlap between
testing and releasing isn't as big as I originally thought. Add to that
that the very definition of what a release is is in question. The only
overlap that really exists is that there's a set of boxes that exist and
that they build in somewhat similar ways.
I have only ever thought that the autotester provides multiple different
platforms which we could build the tools and create the releases[1] on.
What I see as the advantage is:
* The autotester is always available
* Not a single person need to have all different platforms to create a
release
* We don't need to rely on someone else to build packages for a given
platform. He/she may be away for a few days and suddenly we can't get a
release for a given platform
* It's reproducible. We're creating the release on the same machines
every time
Just look at the last release. It doesn't include pre-compiled binaries
for FreeBSD, because Walter's machine apparently can't build it anymore
without running out of memory. That must never happen.
But there's also a hell of a lot of differences.[SNIP]
I'm not saying that the autotester will just magically be able to build
releases. I'm saying it provides the platforms we need (ok, seems to be
missing one or two Linux distributions) to be able to build releases.
As you say, we don't yet have an automated process of creating releases.
But when we're creating that (writing a script/tool) it need to support
building on several different machines, then be able to collect the
result (cross-platform zip). We don't want to create a script that
automates the release, then change all that when we won't it to run on
the autotester machines.
BTW, I'm not sure we even can create an automate process without
something like the autotester. We need to be able to build on all
supported platforms. Sure, someone else might have a complete fleet of
machines. It's not the autotester itself that is important, it's all the
machines it runs on.
[1] When I say "release", in this case I'm referring to building the
compiler, all the tools and libraries, packaging it in a platform
specific installer and cross-platform zip.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
