Packagers: nightly builds?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:02:13 -0600, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> I would like to start making nightly build of the stable branch
> available. This will help our testers greatly, especially during the
> code freeze. For starters, I'd like to see Windows and Mac plus Debian
> and Fedora for x86.
>
> So let me know if it's possible to automate your build.

I would love to provide nightly-style builds for FreeBSD too.

One of the main tricky details that I will probably need help with is
something like an `increasing package number', so that I can hack at the
`ports/devel/mercurial-stable/Makefile' file and add a PORTREVISION that
keeps increasing forever.

Right now I have an experimental port on my laptop that uses the build
date as the port revision, i.e.

    PORTREVISION!= date -u '+%y%m%d%H%M%S'

This seems a bit 'hackish', but it might work.  Does it look reasonable?

Is there something smarter that we can use in either the Mercurial build
scripts or the build glue for FreeBSD that would help us correlate these
with node hashes?