[M3devel] HEADS UP: Release engineering, was: Re: CM3 Release

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 11:26:11AM +0200, Olaf Wagner wrote:
> 
> I'd rather avoid creating a branch too early, as that means more work
> by selecting and merging fixes from trunk to branch. So here my questions:
> 
>  o Do we all agree on a temporary code freeze?
>  o When should we start? I.e. wha changes would you like to complete
>    before we start the release process?

One thing that's essential is to debug the documentation -- 
specifically, the installation instructions, the various README files, 
and so forth.  A naive user. competent in the ways of computers, but not 
yet in the ways of Modula 3, should be able to follow the instructions 
and succeed.

Now I've done Modula 3 installations from snapshots before.  So I'm no 
longer the naive user you want from this.  If we can find a few 
colunteers who have never done such installations before, it would be 
useful to have them try to install, log the results, and come up with a 
list of obscuritues in the docs.  (right down to difficulties in finding 
the docs!)

But I have never compiled and installed the entire system from CVS.  
I've just downloaded the source from CVS, using the helpful instructions 
on http://modula3.elegosoft.com/cm3/, so I can report on how this goes, 
and there there are problems.

First problem: the instructions don't say that 

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous at modula3.elegosoft.com:/usr/cvs login
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous at modula3.elegosoft.com:/usr/cvs checkout cm3

create a new dubdirectory of the current directory called cm3, and put 
everything in there.  In particular, if there's already a directory 
called cm3, the downloaded source code will be plunked right on top of 
whatever was there.

This may be obvious to experienced cvs users, but cvs is no longer the 
standard version control system, and we shouln't expect familiarity.

-- hendrik