Things we ought to do to improve our packaging

[Steve Borho]

On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 2:01 PM, Augie Fackler <raf at durin42.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 01:53:34PM -0500, Matt Mackall wrote:
> > [this discussion needs to be cross-posted]
> >
> > We've got a few long-standing problems with our current packaging:
> >
> > - lag official release
> > - not automated
> > - not reproduceable by third parties
> > - not signed
> > - lack nightly builds
> > - notable missing platforms (RHEL)
> > - not uniform in configuration
> >
> > Our attitude to date has been "well, we're not really in charge of that,
> > that's done unofficially by volunteers". I think we've reached a point
> > where this needs to start changing.
> >
> > In an ideal world, a release would work like this:
> >
> > - I tag the release
> > - I push it
> > - Automated builders kick off on a bunch of VMs or hosts
> > - Builders run stock makefile targets or scripts in tarball
> > - Packages get signed
> > - Packages get uploaded to one or more locations, including
> > mercurial.selenic.com
> > - Download links get updated
> >
> > Importantly, this same process would also be used to produce automated
> > nightly builds for testing and bug reporting and discovering packaging
> > problems before release dates.
> >
> > The job of packagers would thus shift from "(manually?) building and
> > uploading binaries" to "making sure the committed build rules are
> > correct and up-to-date".
> >
> > I think this also needs to be inclusive of builds for packaging systems
> > (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Centos, Solaris, Pypi, etc.). These actually
> > suffer from more or less the same problems even though the distribution
> > model is different. So we should be building nightlies and release
> > builds for these systems and be more directly responsible for quality
> > and timeliness here as well.
>
> This honestly sounds like a great improvement, given how stale the
> packages for Ubuntu tend to be, and how some packagers took it upon
> themselves in the past to enable all the extensions.
>
>
On the Windows side, everything is automated except for two steps:

1 - signing packages requires a passphrase to be entered
2 - uploading is currently manually done through BB's clunky web interface

If we had an SCP or FTP URL to upload to, and a sane policy for deleting
old nightlies after a short while, it could be automated.

#1 could be dealt with if the person signing the package didn't mind
storing their passphrase on disk somewhere.

--
Steve Borho
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