[Bf-committers] Linux package maintainers

[Kent Mein]

In reply to Dan Eicher (dan at trollwerks.org):

> Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 13:26:14 -0700
> From: Dan Eicher <dan at trollwerks.org>
> To: bf-blender developers <bf-committers at blender.org>
> Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Linux package maintainers
> Reply-To: bf-blender developers <bf-committers at blender.org>
> 
> The arch people do make a valid point, it really isn't that hard to produce
> a tarball when doing the 'release ahoy' announcement.
> 
> I asked about this before (on the IRC maybe?), why not just do a svn export
> and have everyone build from that instead of using specific svn
> tags/versions? Everyone's happy and it occasionally finds issues like
> building blender outside a svn checkout was producing wonky version numbers
> on the splash screen for a while there.
> 

Note we do, do a source tarball durring each release.  Most of the time I
wait until after the release because there are lots of false starts.

Every release we have at least 1 or two oops we need to bump
the version to blah now...
And then quite frequently we do an a release as well and it happens again.

Tarballs are big and expensive on disk space, and when you do the export you
really have no way of knowing what version of svn that export was created
from.  (Unless we added some text to the tarball or renamed it or something.)

I'm certainlly willing to change how I've been doing the tarballs if it helps
people, but how do we handle false starts, and I really do not think that
tarballs replace the tags.

General flow is this for each platform maintainer:
	Release ahoy announced.
	They checkout and build stuff, upload to server
	Maybe one or two updates get pushed out
	They then go and build again, upload to server
	A third party person collects builds and puts them in place on the web.

It's very easy to lose track of when a build was built.  I think removing
tags would make this harder to resolve, and or we would wind up with a
bunch of tarballs that were only valid for an hour or two because updates
were applied...

Kent