[opensource-dev] Change to repository usage - take note

[Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)]

I've updated the wiki page on our Viewer Integration and Release Process - I suggest that anyone pulling from our sources, whether for contribution back to us or not, review that page.

The key change is that the viewer-release repository (not viewer-development) should be considered the stable base on which you should be building.

All three canonical repos will still be public - the others will continue to be available for you to see sources before they are in either beta or release viewers; some other Linden Lab project (pre viewer-development) repositories may also be public as the needs of the project dictate.  The Snowstorm team review repositories will of course remain public.

I strongly suggest that third party viewer developers treat the viewer-development and viewer-beta repositories as experimental; pull from them into development repositories if you wish to work on pre-release features, but be aware that you may have to refork if the changes are set aside.   I recommend that you not release viewers to large numbers of users that contain those changes.

This change has been motivated by a number of occasions over the last few months during which release of some features has been delayed or made more difficult by problems that had been merged into the single development>beta stream; the new methodology allows for us to simply set aside any such badly broken build and begin again with a clean fork of viewer-release while the problem is solved.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

In the past some special projects have fed straight into viewer-beta - does this mean that all new project work will always hit viewer-development before viewer-beta?

What happens with viewer-pre-beta and viewer-pre-release?

Thanks.

[Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)]

On 2012-03-11 04:51 , Hitomi Tiponi wrote:

In the past some special projects have fed straight into viewer-beta - does this mean that all new project work will always hit viewer-development before viewer-beta?

Well, I hesitate to say 'always' about anything, but the normal expectation is that everything goes through viewer-development.  Note (yet again) that this means that something that was in viewer-development on one day may be removed to make room for a more urgent project the next.

If there are especially bad bugs for which we have a well-understood fix, that fix may be committed first in viewer-beta (or in very severe cases even viewer-release) in order to build an update to the beta release and/or the next stable release build.  Those fixes will of course be merged back to viewer-development promptly.

What happens with viewer-pre-beta and viewer-pre-release?

They are disappearing (for the time being, I've renamed them... as soon as I'm confident enough that the new systems are working smoothly, I'll delete them).  They were used to isolate the building of candidates for promotion to the next level; I'm replacing that with just moving the viewer-{beta,release}-candidate tags.