Re: [be] BE and git-- I can't fetch it! (automating packaging)

[Jonathan Marsden]

On 05/14/2011 03:07 AM, Teus Benschop wrote:

> On Fri, 2011-05-13 at 23:06 -0700, Jonathan Marsden wrote:

>> ... this sort of thing is
>> not automatable.  Humans are not obsolete yet :)

> Let the scripts do the boring things. Humans are left with the
> interesting bits ;)

Scripts and tools for many of the boring parts exist already; for
example uscan and uupdate for mostly-automated handling of new upstream
releases.  bzr bd builsd directly from a bzr repository... and there are
tools for for testing building of packages in chroots, pbuilder and
similar programs.

There are also now "easy" ways to get nightly builds of packages in a
PPA to happen automatically, with the packaging files stored in bzr on
Launchpad, for instance.  But before you actually publish anything for
"normal users" or for inclusion in an official repository, you're likely
to need a human who understands packaging anyway.  And any significant
change to the source tree (a big new feature, for example) will quite
likely break the automated build process, so whoever is "in charge" of
it gets a stream of emails from the automated builder, followed rapidly
by another stream of requests from users to fix it... I'm just not *so*
committed to BE that I want that to happen to me!

If weekly (or even daily) packaging of the head of the Bibledit git tree
would be really valuable to your user community, tell me that, and we
can at least look into it.  However, in Kim's case, this would probably
flood her limited bandwidth Internet connection and so not really be of
use!  And, as you can tell, I'm wary of the implied committment to
keeping the automated builds working, and the time involved in doing that.

Jonathan