[Adium-devl] Nightly Builds?

[Colin Barrett]

You may have seen some of the commits I've been doing the past few  
days. In case you haven't, I've been setting up parts of the  
infrastructure we would need to produce periodic builds automatically  
(using buildbot) and updating people to newer builds (with Sparkle).  
Big thanks to my co-conspirator Zac!

I'm far enough along now that I think the question of "do we even want  
to do this?" needs asking. I (obviously) would argue yes. My main  
reason is that it gets more people running the current code. We need  
people testing what we write and filing bugs. The past few releases  
cycles we've put in a lot of work just fixing regressions once people  
get alphas and betas -- with nightly builds, we'll have a lot of those  
same people looking for problems as we go, so we'd be able to catch  
regressions when they happen, which hopefully will cut down on  
debugging time since everything is still fresh.

In the past when we did weekly alpha releases (2004), we had problems  
because we advertised them on the main page of our website[1]. This  
was clearly not a good idea, and not a mistake we would make again.  
I'd propose that the URL be announced just in the the topic of #adium.  
Maybe put a note up on the beta page telling people to try the  
nightlies instead, too. Definitely not on the main page, and probably  
not on the official Adium blog (at least, not right away).

I think in addition to announcing too widely, our past bad experiences  
with nightly builds were a conflict of culture. We're also a much  
different project than we were 4 years ago -- back then we hadn't even  
released publicly yet, we were still "Adium 2.0", and we used the blog  
on the front page to hold conversations back and forth (take a look!).  
We're a much more mature and stable project than we were then, I think  
we're ready for the responsibility of making sure code on the trunk is  
useable by a thousand people.

Thoughts? Let's try to arrive at a consensus by Wednesday.

-Colin

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20040121135533/http://www.adiumx.com/