Stable Branches - Any way to get the latest SHA without waiting for Omahaproxy?

[Holger]

Hi all,

From what I understand, the only way to figure out which SHA is the latest on a stable branch is by using http://omahaproxy.appspot.com/
While that guarantees that all the SHAs being built are 'good SHAs', it can add a considerable delay on when the latest stable code can be tested.

While SHAs get tagged before they end up on Omahaproxy (e.g. 53.0.2785.31), it is not clear what platform that build is meant for.
Furthermore, from looking at historical data, it does not look like everything with the same major version in a stable tag is linear (e.g. 51.0.2704.81 made a jump from 51.0.2704.8 to 51.0.2704.14, even though tags in between existed)
Is that just an anomaly and it should be assumed that stable tags are always linear?
Is there any downside to always using the latest tag even if it was not meant for a specific platform (e.g. 52.0.2743.91 on anything but Linux)?
How do Googlers figure out which SHAs to build?

I'd love to hear your thoughts / insights! :)

Thanks,
Holger

[Torne (Richard Coles)]

Builds aren't "meant" for anything in particular. Many builds are just triggered automatically on a schedule if there are any changes. We *later* look at builds and decide whether we want to release them, and for what platform. The latest stable code is always "whatever was last released to the stable channel in Chrome" - it's never going to be something newer than what's listed on omahaproxy.

As for how we figure out which SHAs to build, that's easy: we do all development on master, not on release branches, and so we only ever build the latest version of master :)

Release branches are pretty much built only by the bots, and the bots just build whatever - it's the results of the bots building that we use to determine what is good.

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[Torne (Richard Coles)]

Oh, and no, you shouldn't use a newer tag than we've released. It may have changes only intended for some special purpose in it, or it might not even compile or run, or it may not have been tested at all yet. There's no particular reason why you'd want to use something newer.

[Holger]

Gotcha, thanks for the explanations! :)