Re: Nightly CVS tarballs
FWIW I have always advocated automated weekly beta snapshots, with the idea
that if people know when the release is to be cut they will be somewhat
more careful about submitting unstable things close to the load.
I think people's pain is real because there are so *few* beta releases. We
used to have manual beta releases almost weekly at one point. This was much
easier for people who couldn't use CVS to pick up.
andy
At 11:35 AM 9/6/01 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>>>>> "SY" == Steve Youngs
<youngs(a)xemacs.org> writes:
SY> Do you mean, a diff against the previous day? Easily doable,
SY> but is it necessary?
Yes, and no. Just convenient for someone who doesn't have a nearly
bleeding edge copy. Either new to the bleeding edge or haven't hacked
it since the last beta.
Second, it's useful documentation to see where recent activity is. I
use CVS that way all the time, it's more accurate than anybody's
ChangeLogs except Ben's.
SY> I don't know about other developers, but if I didn't have
SY> access to CVS for whatever reason I'd be keeping a working
SY> backup.
Working, yes, bleeding edge, no. Not everybody has the luxury of
waiting 'til tomorrow; for many developers, "tomorrow" will be
_Monday_.
SY> People who hack from a nightly CVS tarball have to realise
SY> that the code they have could be up to 24 hours out of date
SY> and need to make allowances for that. Such as, if the current
SY> day is broken, wait until the next day's tarball is
SY> released. (Of course, they are quite welcome to fix the
SY> breakage.)
SY> Is that too harsh?
No. But if the point is to make it convenient for people who don't
have normal (== CVS) access to hack bleeding edge XEmacsen, why not
take out some nearly free insurance?
It costs us almost nothing to make the two diffs I propose. Two or
four lines of code, 100kB (if Ben or Martin is in top form) of disk
space. If that means that once in the next year somebody who
otherwise would not be able to work on XEmacs _now_ can work on XEmacs
_now_, I think it's worth it. But you're doing the work. :-)
It also means that if somebody reports a compile bug against "today",
we can reply "did you try yesterday?" if the cause isn't obvious
instead of digging around in the code for a bug that very well may not
be there.
--
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