Defining the damn 3.9 process! (was Re: SqueakFoundation money)

[Cees De Groot]

[Removed board from Cc]

On 12/8/05, goran at krampe.se <goran at krampe.se> wrote:
> Now, *how* do we "feed" you guys? Do we throw them in your inbox *and*
> send a corresponding mandatory email to the v3.9 list (seems
> reasonable)?

I think that a daily build of an alpha release should:
- Grab latest versions of everything from inbox
- Copy them to v39a repository
- Update the image with them and spit out an updater which is subsequently
  pushed to the update stream;
- Run all unit tests and post the results to a webpage (a la
Tinderbox, let's call it SqueakFire ;-)).

And this done every night. It will be excruciatingly painful first,
but my experience at Soops where they do this all the time has shown
that once it settles down (like: actually runs most nights ;-)), it is
of tremendous help.

> And if this is a good process - when you decide to muck
> about in our package :) how do you handle *us*?

Not, in principle. Scenario: tewards team pushes package in inbox.

Possibility A: XNext day, SqueakFire doesn't show your package - hey,
it didn't load. Team can fix.

Possibility B:  Next day, SqueakFire shows broken tests for new
package - grab the latest image and go fix'em.

Possibility C: Next day, SqueakFire shows all green for new package.
Steward team goes out and parties.

I want this to be an automated process. So badly, in fact, that it
provided the proverbial last drop in the bucket for me renting a
second private box at Hetzner whose abundant CPU power (Sempron64
3000+) will be available to host this stuff - at least until we know
what the load etcetera is so we can move it to box2. And I hereby
promise to blog less, spit out less mini packages, and put some
serious effort into this iff this is a process we can agree on.

Where does this leave the team?
- The team decides on what packages are in and not (and hunt down Stewards);
- The team should at least manage/drive harvesting of patches for
packages that aren't Stewarded yet;
- The team decides when it is time to 'slow down' and go into beta,
where the process will stay roughly the same but the criteria for
uploading to inbox may become stricter and a build is now and then
taken from the 'daily build stream' which gets more rigorous testing
so that it might be labeled as a public beta.

That's my 2 cents ;-)