[sword-devel] New automatic release bundling - questions re strategy

[Peter von Kaehne]

I understand that the new release mechanism can do an awful lot of work
itself and without needing much human intervention. Which is of course
great and exactly what we need. Thanks Greg, Troy and DM!

Questions:

Will we, can we move towards a significant gear change wrt releases?
Personally I think, if we have a painless mechanism to produce API/ABI
stable releases any significant bug fix, any significant code
improvement should be allowed to trigger a release. Is this something
which we could agree on?

If this is an agreed target, what would we need beyond Jenkins to make
this possible? Coding discipline, branching etc?

I am not sure if SVN is up for that (no I do not want to restart the
Git/SVN debate) - but we should really have two branches - one which
accepts only bug fixes and other ABI/API stable commits and one which
accepts patches which push things on, merging continuously and
automatically stuff going into the bugfix branch. But this _should_ be
automatic. I know in Git we can have hooks at various places and I
would expect that we could have a mechanism which runs a build on any
new push and rejects it if certain tests are not working. Is this
possible in SVN? Maybe even an API/ABI comparison test?

I really really want us to move to a place where bugfixes are rolling
out of our release machine whenever they are there....

There are more questions, but I think this a start.

Peter