[freeside-devel] RPM-friendly releases, was: 1.7.3

[Ivan Kohler]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 11:34:30AM -0400, Richard Siddall wrote:
> Ivan Kohler wrote:
> > I don't know anything about .spec files and wouldn't know where to start 
> > to hammer out procedures for them.
> > 
> > Is this something you can handle yourself?  What do you need from us to 
> > hammer this out?  Is there something you need to add to the "release" 
> > target in the Makefile?
> > 
> 
> I think ideally you'd announce that a new release was imminent and I'd
> immediately build a set of RPMs and test that they both work and contain
> all the essential files for a Freeside installation before the release
> was done.  I'm worried about two things:
> 
> 1/ I don't get around to doing the testing and hold up the release.

Right.  Or the release anyway happens without those components because 
they lack an active (enough) maintainer or team.

> 2/ The lack of any test framework, so testing will be manually intensive.

I'd be thrilled if we can make this happen, but we aren't going to 
hold up the releases of 1.7.3 and 1.9.0 for a major new component, so 
we have to work with what we have available.

> Otherwise, the changes to the .spec file for each release are quite
> simple: you make sure the Version tag matches the upcoming release, and
> set the Release tag back to 1 as an RPM set built from the release
> tarball should be the first RPM release with that version number.
> 
> I'll see if I can modify the Makefile to handle the mechanics of that.

Yes, some automated way to handle this task would be ideal.

> I think one approach that might help improve the quality of the RPM
> releases when you roll a new tarball would be to create daily RPMs of
> the CVS head and major branches, so bleeding edge RPM users could report
> problems before you roll a release.  I'd have to think about the naming
> convention for those RPMs (freeside-1.7-cvs20070807-1.src.rpm?), and how
> to script up the RPM creation.
> 
> Would you be willing to host a yum repository for the RPMs, or should
> someone else volunteer to do that? ;>

I don't have anywhere to setup daily RPM builds or know how to setup a 
yum repository, but I'd be happy to host it you can actually set it up.  
Is it something you can do from your normal public_html directory on our 
server like I do for the Debian repositories?

-- 
_ivan