Re: RFC: nightly build and patch policy

2008/6/18, James K. Lowden <[email protected]>:
>
> Your thoughts on the utility of the following are solicited.
>
> Our current release practice is:
>
> 1.  build a snapshot of CVS HEAD every night
> 2.  release every year or so
> 3.  provide a point release (e.g. 0.82.1) as needed
>
> My sense is that FreeTDS would be more useful to people using the release
> (as opposed to CVS HEAD nightly snapshots) if they had an easier way to
> get/apply the latest bugfixes.  One can always use CVS to generate a
> patch, but that's quite a bit of work and beyond many people's skill set.
>
>
> I propose instead:
>
> 1.  same
> 2.  same
> 3.  same
>
> 4.  Build the current release branch "snapshot" nightly.  This would
> provide a "rolling current" of bugfixes to the lastest release.  The
> tarball would be named freetds-stable-patched.tar.gz.  The sources would
> unpack in a directory named "freetds-[ver].dev.[date] where [ver] is the
> pending release (i.e. 0.82.1 today) and [date] is in the usual yyyymmdd
> form.
>
> 5.  Post a freetds-stable.patch file that comprises the output of "CVS
> diff -r [release]" where [release] is the release's tag in CVS.
>
> Were this policy in place now, you would find two new files in
> http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/freetds/stable/:


5 is what you find at freetds.sf.net, yes useful but I agree that many
people would prefer a full package. Not anybody are used to use patch
utils... Do you thing to change configure.ac script in order to produce
proper directory name or just package with a different directory name?


1.  freetds-stable-patched.tar.gz, which unpacks as
>        freetds-0.82.1.dev.20080618, and
> 2.  freetds-stable.patch, which contains everything needed to convert
> freetds-0.82.tar.gz into freetds-stable-patched.tar.gz.
>
> I might revise the naming conventions slightly, but the purpose and
> content of the files wouldn't change.
>
> Now that I've cooked up this idea, I'd like a reality check from the real
> world.  Would it be helpful?  Would you use the new files?  Inquiring
> minds want to know.


Many time I suggest to apply patchs at freetds.sf.net so yes, they are
useful (and I hope used :) ) however they tend to be seen as an unofficial
thing and patch way doesn't help that much.


Yours humbly,
>
> --jkl



Regards
  Frediano