Re: How to make releases with BuildStream: Feedback Wanted

[Michael Catanzaro <mike catanzaro gmail com>]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 2:20 AM, Tristan Van Berkom 
<tristan vanberkom codethink co uk> wrote:
>   o nobody as far as I can tell *cares* about these static release    
>  modulesets anyway, nobody is building from the exact tarball     
> build metadata that we've produced to match an exact release version 
> (or, is this true ?)

I believe that is true. But:

> So, maybe it's possible to find some middle ground where we continue 
> to publish the collective NEWS and new release versions published by 
> module maintainers, but only publish build metadata for a tested 
> "snapshot" of the latest git commit shas at the moment of a release ?

The value of testing tarballs is that it allows us to know if a 
downstream build has a chance of succeeding, because downstreams use 
tarballs. So I don't think it would be appropriate to stop testing 
tarball releases, like we do now. Every time I build a GNOME release, I 
find at least a couple maintainers who I need to nag to make new 
tarball releases, because other modules have begun to depend on some 
unreleased functionality, or because the latest release of their module 
is broken. So testing a moduleset built with tarball releases is very 
important IMO.

Michael