Builder process guides

[raevol]

Hey-

So after the debacle that was the 0.11.1 release, I feel like we should write up guides for how to build packages for the given platforms. When we lose builders, we need to be able to find replacements for them fast, and having pre-written guides for the process will be very useful for that.

If this idea is approved, could I bother each of the builders (there's only 2 at the moment) to make pages on the Wiki for their build process? Please make them as detailed and noob friendly as possible, while still making them manageable and elegant so they can be easily maintained.

The first half of the guide should probably be a link to how to set up a build environment, found here. The second half of the guide should just be how to put all the needed files into a distributable archive.

For Windows my understanding is that this is just zipping everything up? For Mac and Linux we need guides for building the packages though.

Again, this idea needs to be approved by the team. What do you guys think?

[Zini]

Not going to work, because we will change the build process from the next release on. Also, the actual build process should be trivial then (since fully automated), but there are still plenty of things that could go wrong, that are out of scope for whatever help we can provide. These things need a little bit more expertise in packaging.

Note, that this is only my personal opinion (I am certainly not an expert on this topic). If the builders think it is a good idea, then go ahead. But it should definitely be written for the fully automated builds we will have in 0.12 and not the manual/semi-manual ones we have now. Also, the importance of testing should be stressed.

edit: Wrote building when I meant packaging all over the place. The job description is misleading anyway. Maybe we should replace the builder titles with platform maintainers and packagers.

[raevol]

Ah, I didn't realize that the build changes are going to make packaging that trivial. That's very promising, but is the idea that you do a build and it'll spit out a complete .deb/.zip/.dmg at the end?

[Zini]

Probably no .zip. The plan is to have an installer for Windows.

AFAIK .deb works already, at least in theory, but probably missing a couple of files that will require cmake script adjustments. There must be some make target for it, though I don't know what it is called.

I thought .dmg would work too, but a recent report on the issue tracker indicates otherwise.

[raevol]

Well, that's awesome. Definitely going to make things easier.

[pvdk]

AFAIK .deb works already, at least in theory, but probably missing a couple of files that will require cmake script adjustments. There must be some make target for it, though I don't know what it is called.

It's currently not up-to-date with the dependency versions and it's missing some, like Qt and libpng. You'll have to call cpack to create a package, it will then automatically tell it needs to build a .deb, at least it did on my test machine.