From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>
To: development@lists.ipfire.org
Subject: Changes to nightly builds
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2020 11:03:44 +0000
Message-ID: <25F7AA09-A21A-491F-8D9A-4D35E0865910@ipfire.org>
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Hello folks,

On this week=E2=80=99s telephone conference we have talked about how we can i=
mprove our release engineering.

We have discovered a couple of problems:

* We release fairly slowly. Releases are being held because of small bugs and=
 features that are unrelated to it won=E2=80=99t be released either.

* We have very few people taking part in testing. One reason is that updates =
are large and there are many things that needs to be tested/can break things.

* That leads to finding bugs very late and since we release slowly, fixes mig=
ht take months to show up at users.

Although we do not have a bullet-proof solution, we have some ideas that we w=
ant to trial:

I have added two more nightly builders, so that we have more build resources =
and nightly builds will be available quicker:

  * x86-01.haj.ipfire.org building x86_64
  * x86-02.haj.ipfire.org building i586
  * arm64-01.dub.ipfire.org building aarch64
  * arm64-01.lon.ipfire.org building armv5tel

So we will be guaranteed to have a build available about 4-5 hours after comm=
itting changes. That is awesome, because we can identify problems and fix the=
m on the same day.

Those servers are uploading all builds to https://nightly.ipfire.org and will=
 now send a notification about a successful or failed build to nightly-builds=
(a)lists.ipfire.org. You can all subscribe to that list and see your changes =
break things or get notified when a new build is available for testing.

Subscribe here:

  https://lists.ipfire.org/mailman/listinfo/nightly-builds

Emails look like this:

  https://lists.ipfire.org/pipermail/nightly-builds/2020-February/000000.html

Since packages cannot be installed from testing, we are going to automaticall=
y deploy these updates to the Pakfire trees:

This has not been fully implemented and tested, yet, but the plan is as follo=
ws:

Next will automatically be deployed into a new testing branch. That will be h=
ighly experimental and we will exclude the core updates here, because they wo=
uld definitely be half-baked.

Master will be automatically deployed to the current testing branch including=
 the core updates. This is probably where most people will be.

The stable release will obviously not be automatically deployed.

We will modify the ISO images so that people who download and install a night=
ly build will automatically be part of the correct testing branch and find th=
e right add-ons.

This way we hope to achieve the following things:

* Make the whole job a lot easier for Arne. He is spending a lot of time buil=
ding releases, uploading them, etc. That is now almost fully automated.

* We make testing easier for users as we will always be able to provide a rec=
ent build without putting any extra leg work into it.

Please join the mailing list and join us with our testing efforts.

Also leave your comments. I am sure there is more we can do to improve.

Best,
-Michael

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