[crossfire] (Automated) Client Snapshot Releases

[Lauwenmark Akkendrittae]

Le samedi 29 novembre 2008, Kevin R. Bulgrien a écrit :
> A script has been developed that automatically creates (debuggable with
> sources) snapshot builds of the crossfire clients (tarballs and RPMs,
> but no Win32 support).  It has logic to initialize a build environment
> from SVN and to update from SVN for each snapshot.
<snip>

Such a scripted packaging system has been tested on ailesse for the binary 
client (Just like the current Gridarta/JXClient daily builds, it generated 
Debian packages, then RPM ones through Alien). It had been removed last year 
for basically two reasons:

- Architecture portability issues: although the client could be cross-compiled 
for other architectures than x86 (at least x86_64, ARM and PPC were 
supported), there was no way to ensure the non-x86 packages produced a 
working result. Since a package version always automatically replaced the 
previous one, chances to screw up a non-x86 installation were estimated too 
high to be acceptable;

- Distribution portability issues: Packages could only be built reliably for 
Linux. I wasn't able to implement cross-building for Solaris, FreeBSD or OSX;

Given the time it would have taken to properly fix those issues - and I'm 
actually not sure they could have been - and also given that another client 
was already available as a daily package, daily packaging of the C clients 
has been abandoned.

This experience showed that what was difficult was not the packaging process 
itself, but ensuring that it gets supported outside the Linux/x86(_64) world.

> Are there any good reasons left to avoiding putting the
> 2.x client out there?  We're going on two years of client enhancements
> with no releases.  That can't be helping project exposure any.
>
The fact that the 2.x server itself is still a highly moving target, and thus 
that a release would be very prematurate. To me, it seems that a release, 
unless marked specifically as "alpha/beta", needs to be relatively stable and 
finished.

-- 

Lauwenmark.
------------
"Drive defensively: buy a tank."
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