[oi-dev] Distribution build system

[Colin Ellis]

Great idea, worth the pain!

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Andrzej Szeszo <aszeszo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All
>
> The project is moving forward very slowly. I my opinion one of the main
> reasons behind it is lack of unified distribution build system.
>
> Previous releases were put together manually. Probably one or two core
> contributors would be be able to repeat the whole process at this point
> without investing significant amount of time into learning how things fit
> together. We need distribution release and publishing process to be
> automated and repeatable.
>
> There is a significant amount of bug reports in OpenIndiana bug tracker.
> Many of bugs require very simple changes to get fixed. URL updates or
> branding updates for example. Many contributors are more than capable of
> fixing such bugs. Because it is not clear what goes where, and also how to
> build and then test things many contributors simply don't bother looking at
> bugs at all.
>
> I am proposing creating a unified distribution build system. A system that
> would build the whole distribution after issuing a single "make publish" or
> similar command.
>
> Having such system will let us to release early, release often. It should
> improve the development progress in general. Bugfixes and security updates
> would get integrated in no time. New users would have an easy start. We
> could point new contributors at the build system and simply ask them to
> start hacking. Having all consolidations referenced from a single build
> system would make it clear to them where things go. Base system changes,
> etc. - core consolidations, new software - add-on consolidation directory,
> and so on.
>
> Continuous build system could be implemented using the same tools on the
> OpenIndiana build machines, including the SPARC ones.
>
> Many people will say that this is not possible and that even Oracle is not
> doing it. I say such system is possible but will require significant amount
> of work and significant amount of time to prepare. It will be worth the
> effort if done right. All major open source OS distributions have the
> release process automated in one way or another. I think this is the key to
> our success. Splitting the build and release engineering process between
> consolidation maintainers/owners based on Oracle model proved to not to work
> well for us.
>
> I would like to start a dialog between the core contributors about such
> build system. Discuss whether it is needed or not. And if the decision is
> made that it is needed - discuss requirements, technical details and then
> actually implement it!
>
> Andrzej
>
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