Hello folks,
On this week’s telephone conference we have talked about how we can improve 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’t 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 might take months to show up at users.
Although we do not have a bullet-proof solution, we have some ideas that we want 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 committing changes. That is awesome, because we can identify problems and fix them 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@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 automatically deploy these updates to the Pakfire trees:
This has not been fully implemented and tested, yet, but the plan is as follows:
Next will automatically be deployed into a new testing branch. That will be highly experimental and we will exclude the core updates here, because they would 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 nightly build will automatically be part of the correct testing branch and find the 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 building 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 recent 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