[Zope3-dev] Re: faulty releases and pypi access [update]

[Jim Fulton]

On Sep 27, 2007, at 7:18 AM, Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:

> On 27 Sep 2007, at 13:07 , Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> On 9/27/07, Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> Further, anybody who finds the effort of creating a "fresh' checkout
>>> bevore making a release too burdensome should consider themselves
>>> self-selected out of the "release manager" pool.
>>>
>>> I'm *not* kidding about that:  taking shortcuts durng the release
>>> process transfers pain / cost to everyone downstream.
>>
>> While I fully agree that releases should be done with care and
>> attention, and that doing bad releases creates pain/cost for
>> everybody, this line of argumentation can be used to back up any form
>> of complication to the release process. :)
>>
>> Let's focus on the reasons for each step and keep the discussion at
>> that level, please? I think it's useful if people ask "is that really
>> necessary?" for steps in the release process. Just weigh the pros and
>> cons. I'd like to understand more about the trouble Philipp ran into
>> doing releases from the original checkout and then tagging.
>
> I've summarized this in another thread [1], but I'll be happy to  
> elaborate here:
>
> * People actually forget to make the tag. This happened to Roger  
> the other day. It happened to Jim before with zc.buildout. I'm not  
> mentioning their names to point fingers. I'm just pointing out that  
> people who've been with us for a long time forget. If the process  
> said they should actually check out the tag, they'll hardly forget.

Having a script we have to mindlessly follow will help.

> * People create the wrong tags or tags in the wrong places. This  
> happened to Jim the other day with ZODB 3.7.1. Again, I'm not  
> blaming him. But I believe if he had to check out the tag to make  
> the release, he would've caught his mistake.

I doubt it.  I would have probably just rereleased 3.7.1, possibly  
with 3.7.2 uselessly included.

> * People forget to clean up the 'build' directory. This happened to  
> me the other day. Let me elaborate: I have a trunk checkout of  
> zopeproject that I use to develop it. Whenever I wanted to make a  
> release, I'd just prepare it, tag it and generate the distributino  
> from the trunk checkout. The problem was that I had moved stuff  
> around, but the old stuff was still making it to the egg because it  
> still sat around in the 'build' direcdtory that distutils leaves. I  
> know it sucks that distutils doesn't clean up after itself, but  
> that's just the way it is. If you're forced to use a clean  
> checkout, this can't happen.

The build directory is really annoying.

> * People forget to check in important files. This happened to Baiju  
> the other day. He created a CHANGES.txt file and referred to it  
> from setup.py. The only problem is that he forgot to check it in.  
> It can happen, I'm not blaming him. The problem is that setuptools  
> looks at which files are in svn in order to create the archive  
> manifest. So CHANGES.txt wasn't in the tarball and the egg was  
> completely uninstallable (because setup.py couldn't be executed  
> since CHANGES.txt was missing).
>
> These are four separate cases where I've actually witnessed myself  
> or other people mess up. We're forgetful, we can't do anything  
> about that. We can, however, force us to catch our mistakes. I  
> believe that if we made everybody create the tarballs from the tag,  
> it would improve the situation a lot.
>
> I'm beginning to see a consensus that we should make it impossible  
> to create distributions from the trunk or a release branch.

Yup. BTW, I find it helpful to test source releases by unpacking them  
and seeing if I can build eggs from the unpacked source.  Of course,  
it would be even better to run the tests.  I suspect that a buildout  
feature could automate this.  Something along the lines of a buildout  
command that: creates distros from the listed develop directories and  
then installs those distros rather than the develop eggs so that  
tests could be run against the distros.  This would probably be  
something good to do when I have some time to get back to buildout.

Jim

--
Jim Fulton
Zope Corporation