[Adium-devl] Nightly Builds?

[Colin Barrett]

Any more thoughts on this?

I'm making good progress on partial updates.

-Colin

On Feb 9, 2008, at 12:53 PM, Colin Barrett wrote:

> 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/
>
> _______________________________________________
> Adium-devl mailing list
> Adium-devl at adiumx.com
> http://adiumx.com/mailman/listinfo/adium-devl_adiumx.com