Release Engineering Goals

Participants: HeikkiToivonen, MarkJaffe, AndiVajda, MorgenSagen

The goal of the meeting was to get a brandump from Morgen regarding the vision and big ticket items in the build system and release engineering in general. We also discussed more detailed goals and tasks.

1. Too much stuff in the tree and installers.
   • We should make it so that we do not need to build the unchanging 3rd party libraries all the time. Provide instructions on how to download and install them, and/or provide prebuilt packages in our source tree.
   • The Linux and Mac installers especially should look into the system and only download and install those 3rd party packages that are missing.
2. Dependencies don't work in all cases.
   • Some 3rd party libraries do not do proper dependent builds. The problems come in at least two variants: always doing too much work in build, and not noticing changed files at all.
3. Switching away from CVS.
   • CVS is giving us grief, investigate the pros and cons of switching to Subversion, Perforce, ...
4. Upgrading 3rd party packages.
   • In the short term we will be upgrading to wxPython 2.5.1, libxml2 2.6.7, dbxml ?. More upgrades are expected to happen regularly so we need good process for this that does not disrupt development.
5. General release engineering tasks.
   • Tagging the release, building release binaries, ...
6. Bug list.
   • Prioritize bug list.

-- HeikkiToivonen - 10 Mar 2004