[kaffe] Release status...

[Dalibor Topic]

Hi Jim,

Jim Pick wrote:
> There are several steps to making the release:
> 
>  a) Reviewing the changes and summarizing them for the release
>     announcement.

Yeah, that's a bit boring to do at once. I'm guity of not updating the 
NEWS accordingly. I will take care of that.

On a side note, I believe we should feature the latest CVS developemnts 
(AccessController merged in!) on our web site. Otherwise, people may get 
the feeling that the project is asleep where it has been moving at a 
rather fast pace in the last 3 months.

>  b) Building it in several places and actually trying to use it to
>     run some software.  That's been the extent of my testing for
>     the "development" releases.

We could add ant tasks for that in kaffe-extras, like getting, building 
the software and running the regression tests. We've already got ant 
covered, getting the rest of the interesting software to build should be 
fun.

>  c) Fixing any obvious configure issues.  There are so many ways to
>     configure Kaffe, I always seem to run into issues nobody else
>     has.

Yeah, that's kind of ugly to automate ...

>  d) Fixing any "make dist" type problems that show up.  In the final
>     steps of making the release.  Typically, I need to cycle through
>     the build multiple times, as documented here:
> 
> http://www.kaffe.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/kaffe-project-services/release-process/HOW-TO-MAKE-A-RELEASE?rev=1.1&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup 

Yeah, another rather boring bit, Again, I'm to blame for not doing a 
make distcheck regularly. I'm fixing that atm.

> This time around, the amount of work involved has increased a bit, 
> because of the longer interval since the previous release (partly due to 
> my procrastinating).  Also, the fact that so much new good stuff has 
> gone into it means that I encountered a lot of regressions all over the 
> place, to the point I wasn't really happy with the final result.

There is still more to come :) I'd really like to put in the AWT merge 
into CVS as that's some very nice addition to what we have in kaffe so 
far. On my merge list is resyncing with jaxp (again, Chris Burdess is 
quick atm), classpath, jessie.

> (I think the code in CVS right now is quite a bit better than the state 
> it was in when I made the 1.1.5 branch a month ago)

Definitely. Guilhem has been doing a lot of work on the core, so have 
Helmer and Ito, and there were various cleanups and bug fixes for 
non-mainstream platforms.

> Ultimately, I want to automate the whole release process.  When checkins 
> get made, they should be automatically tested for regressions on a whole 
> variety of different platforms and in different configurations.  The 
> code should only be considered release-worthy when it passes all the 
> testing we throw at it.  The release process should be as simple as 
> selecting a particular build that passed all the testing.  This way, we 
> can certify that a particular build works and was tested on all the 
> various platforms and configurations we support.
> 
> The distinction between a "production" release (which is one of my goals
> for this year) and a "development" release should primarily be that the
> production release will have passed a lot more testing.

Yeah, sounds great. And sounds like a good plan leading to more releases 
in a shorter time frame ;)

> If we had such a system in place, then the testing and fixing grunt work 
> that gets left until release time (and lumped onto me) would instead be 
> done incrementally as development occurs, and shared by everyone.
> 
> I actually started coding up a custom regression testing and reporting 
> system last year, and I probably got it 50% done.  I think I could 
> probably get it partially deployed with about a week's worth of work.
> 
> Does anybody have any objections to me holding off on the 1.1.5 release 
> until I get the regression testing system deployed on the server?

No, please go for it.

> Initially, I'll just set up some testing environments on some of the 
> servers I have access too.  After I get something working, I'll try to 
> document as much as possible so other people can help out with the testing.
> 
> If I could get the regression testing system set up to do most of the 
> release testing, that would really make the release process simply 
> (almost automatic).  It would be a lot more fun too.
> 
> Sorry for keeping everybody in suspense for so long...

No worries, it gave us more time to fix problems with the release, so 
the time has been spent well, in my opinion.

cheers,
dalibor topic