Re: [Statcvs-users] Release early and often?

[Richard C. <ri...@cy...>]

Hi Jukka,

Thanks for the thoughtful response! Responses/questions inline.

Am 24.03.2005 um 21:40 schrieb Jukka Uusisalo:
[...]
> How about process as follows:
>
> 1. Decide what new features are in next release
>
> 2. Provide nightly-build. Nightly-build is released from cvs head 
> branch if there are any changes in cvs, code gets compiled and passes 
> unit tests.
>
> 3. When all features in next release are implemented, provide 
> release-candidate. This point there should be branch in cvs for 
> release-
> candidate bugfixes. Propably you will need couple of 
> release-candidates.
>
> 4. When you think release-candidate is stable enough, just release 
> official release or maybe uses take a vote, but propably everybody 
> will use some release candidate as production at this point.

I think I'd rather skip #1. StatCVS contributions (including my own) 
come from people scratching an itch, and it's kind of hard to plan 
that. So I'd rather just wait until there's enough new stuff.

Having a release candidate branch seems like a good idea. This means 
work on new stuff can continue while the candidate matures.

Any guesses how long we might have to stay in RC mode before the 
candidate is well-tested enough?

Also, is it worth the trouble for such a small project? I don't want to 
spend much time managing the process.


> Nighly-builds requires automated build system and good enough unit test
> cases. Do you have checked coverage of unit tests?

I like the idea of nightly builds. Get the new stuff out as fast as 
possible.

Our test coverage is not too good, especially in the HTML output code. 
But I wouldn't worry about that too much, the most important parts are 
well-tested. I believe that nightly builds would drive test quality 
because we would actually rely on the tests.

Any recommendations for a test coverage tool? (I guess the answer will 
have something to do with Maven :-)

How could we implement nightly builds with SourceForge? Just run Ant or 
Maven with a cronjob and dump the dist file on the SourceForge project 
web server? Anyone has experience with that?

Questions, questions, questions ...


> - Jukka -

Richard