Dear Friends, There have been, and may always be, a variety of paths for getting Evergreen. Oldest and truest of these remains the (mostly) monthly builds available from the evergreen-ils.org downloads page.
Despite being a community flush with automation experts of various sorts, these builds do not (quite) build and release themselves. In any given month, depending on where we are in the release cycle, there are generally two or three builds which need to done, and our small team is looking for volunteers to help with these duties. Buildmaster requirements: 1) A love for Evergreen. 2) An ability to methodically follow instructions. 3) A desire to be interrupted once per month in a predictable (yet somehow completely surprising) way. 4) A sixth sense to tell you when a build went wrong, or the discipline to test every build, or sufficient detachment to simply, quietly, and without loss of spirit, re-do a build when problems are discovered. 5) Basic Unix file system skills and HTML editing skills are a plus. Other than the overall outcome, the process is in fact not particularly rigid. If you do not want to do the current build process, but want to try to improve it in some way, we welcome you. If you want to volunteer to only test builds, and thus relieve some of the burden of uncertainty inherent in each release, we welcome you. If you just want to do something simple, like update the HTML of the downloads page each month, we welcome you! As things stand, it has been mostly Blake and I doing the build/release processes for a while (since the 2.12 beta, I believe), with Galen handling communication duties. While it is technically decided month-to-month who does what, we always decide the same things. This works alright for two or three, but once we have a larger team, I intend to try and wrangle some sort of sign up sheet to determine a few months at a time who plans to do what. I think this will bring a little more certainty without losing too much ability for volunteers to size their commitments to their available time. If you wish to join the Buildmasters, please let me know, then start hanging out in the ##eg-release channel on FreeNode. In all likelihood, any further communication will happen there. Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, Dan P.S. "Evergreen Buildmaster" looks really impressive on annual evaluations or resumes.