Developers of Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

Hi, thanks for your reply!

Guillaume Rousse a écrit :
> David Verdin a écrit :
>   
> > We feel that we improved the way versions are handled. We would sure
> > appreciate any input about the intended behaviour (applicable starting
> > version 5.4).
> >     
> I think you're mixing two issues here.
>   
I don't think so. Once we created a script, we just replaced a set of 
operations to perform by one script launch and a few other things (like 
release notes, for examples).
The script itself is just a matter of not forgetting a step, and don't 
spend two hours doing something that can be done in five minutes.
Now, we wonder how often, and under which conditions to launch this 
script. which means we were aware of these two different problems.
> The first one is the desirability of a new release. I don't think
> releasing something without human intervention is the best way to raise
> product quality. A new release for every single typo correction is a bit
> excessive. And concatenating svn changelog messages doesn't produce a
> user-oriented summary of changes.
Well, most of the time, releases from the stable branch just fix bugs. 
So, there are not a lot of changes to communicate about. That's why we 
wanted to make automate it.
Of course, the script used to tag brand new versions implies human 
intervention, as the update of the NEWS file, which summaries important 
changes.
>  This is rather subjective, but I think
> that if no other project currently does it (excepted for nightly
> development build), there must be some reason.
>   
So you concur to our doubts. We think that we must increase the rate of 
release, so that people don't download bugs that have been patched a 
month before. But we felt that a daily base could be too much and would 
lead to too much versions.
Does anybody have a clue about when it is pertinent to release a new 
version?
> The second is the easyness of producing a new release. You're clearly
> reinventing the wheel there. If you had a correct autotools
> configuration, this would be just a matter of 'autoreconf && ./configure
> && make dist' (and even better, make 'distcheck' to automatically
> conduct minimal safety check against it). 
The only difference I see is the name of the command called.
For now, producing a new release is just a matter of 
'/usr/local/bin/tag-new-version.pl'.
Sure, the autotools commands are standard commands, but as the creation 
of new versions implies an access to our servers, we are the only one 
who will ever use these scripts.
Therefore I don't see the point of using them, as what's important is 
the sequence of operations performed, not the name of the command.
> Hence the point of the patches I submitted.
>   
Thanks again for these patches! Olivier is currently working on them. 
This will sure greatly improve the life of packagers!

--
David Verdin
Comité réseau des universités