Things we ought to do to improve our packaging

[Matt Mackall]

On Wed, 2013-08-21 at 14:30 +0400, Nikolaj Sjujsckij wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Aug 2013 01:19:34 +0400, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2013-08-19 at 23:17 +0400, Nikolaj Sjujskij wrote:
> >> Den 2013-08-19 02:29:49 skrev Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com>:
> >>
> >>> On Sun, 2013-08-18 at 16:44 +0200, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> >>>> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 8:29 AM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> >>>>> I don't know, but I suspect there is. How does one grab the
> >> equivalent
> >>>>> of a nightly on Gentoo? How long do I have to wait to install 2.7 if
> >>>> the
> >>>> > packager is on vacation? Is there stuff that requires manual
> >>>> > intervention from release to release like adding new files?
> >>>>
> >>>> As Nikolaj mentioned, you can trivially build packages from your
> >>>> public repo's tip. There are two packagers, so you might have to wait
> >>>> a little bit, but it's only a filename move away (in an overlay) if
> >>>> you want it badly (e.g. no actual building). No intervention is
> >>>> generally required for version bumps.
> >>>
> >>> Ok, so it's fairly painless. Let's flip the question around: is there
> >>> any reason we should NOT be doing automated nightly Gentoo builds to
> >>> spot problems, given how easy it is?
> >
> >>   What for?
> >
> > Because automatic builds are a bog-standard quality assurance mechanism
> > that I shouldn't even have to explain. Yes, Gentoo is very shiny and
> > apparently makes this especially easy... so why oh why are you
> > resisting?
>    Hm. I may have misunderstood you. I've got nothing against
>    autobuilding
> Mercurial on Gentoo. I thought you were talking about _distributing_
> those
> autobuilds, for Gentoo users to actually, well, use them. If we, say,
> just
> build every revision, install it and check list of installed files,
> mailing changes in this list (or something like this), that's by me.
> Useful, too.

I do in fact plan to put the binary packages on line for everything we
autobuild for consistency and for reference. For instance, a dev who
doesn't use or intend to use Gentoo (let's call him 'mpm') might
encounter a need to check what's getting packaged to diagnose a
Gentoo-specific issues. That's a small matter of disk space. I haven't
had to do this yet for Gentoo, but I've done it in the past for Ubuntu,
Windows, RHEL, Mac, Solaris, and even VMS. I have my reasons!

Availability of nightly builds for end users is just one of a dozen
stated global goals for doing packaging better. Please think of the
bigger picture. Whether Gentoo end users will actually want to use the
builds is not a terribly interesting question.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.