[Python-Dev] Regular scheduled releases (original) (raw)

David Bolen db3l.net at gmail.com
Sun Oct 31 02:58:07 CEST 2010

"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> writes:

People will never ever test nightly builds. Been there, done that. Instead, the nightly build process will break, and nobody will fix it for months (or even complain, for that matter).

Certainly seems to be past experience.

I know Martin knows this, but for other readers who may not, my Windows XP buildbot built nightly windows installers (the basic MSI package, close but not necessarily a fully signed new release as Martin makes) starting in September, 2007. It ran successfully for about 6 months, at which point it started to fail fairly consistently. Nobody noticed, and Martin and I finally just shut it down in December, deciding it wasn't worth the effort to try to fix.

My OSX buildbot has been building nightly DMG images (though again, I suspect Ronald has a few extra steps beyond what its doing for a full release) since April. I'd actually be interested in knowing if anyone is using them - I suspect perhaps not.

In both cases, getting the process going actually took quite a bit of effort (even stuff like having to fix the buildbot upload code in the Windows case), not just on my part, but with the help of Martin and Ronald. But without actual use of the result, it's hard to think it was worth it. I'm pretty sure my default reaction to a break-down in the current OSX build process at this point would be to first suggest disabling it unless there were real users.

-- David

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