[Libreoffice-qa] Updater improvements

[Robinson Tryon]

Hi all,

We've chatted a bit about some of the shortcomings of the updater
lately, and I've come up with a couple of suggestions for improving
not only the updater, but parts of our build system and bug tracker as
well.

1) Problem: It's hard to add new build hashes to the updater

The updater mixes code and data in a single file, making it a bit
tricky to add new build hashes.

Suggestion: Factor-out the data from the updater and store it in a database[1].


2) Problem: Build hashes don't automatically get entered into the updater

Suggestion: Tweak the build process (perhaps during the upload step)
so that the build hash is fed into the updater database automatically.


3) Problem: We have to manually update various websites whenever the
current stable and latest versions change. For example:

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 4:25 AM, Christian Lohmaier
<lohmaier at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 4.0 version has reached end-of-life, i.e. no fixes will be provided by
> TDF anymore.
>
> If your site has links to 4.0 downloads, please consider changing that
> to something else...We'd like to remove that version from the
>  mirrornetwork soon...So in order to avoid [problems], please
> update your nl-website.

Suggestion: Keep track of the current stable and latest version in the
updater db. Create some code snippets that can be reused by various NL
sites, templates on the wiki, etc... so that they always display the
right info.


4) Problem: The BSA needs to know the list of currently-supported
versions of LibreOffice

Suggestion: This information could be easily added to/queried from the
updater database.

---

So to sum up, my suggestion is that we store version information in a
database such that it can be
- Updated by the official build/upload process
- Updated by the person(s) who picks the 'stable' build
- Queried by the BSA
- Queried by various websites that need the information

Did I forget anything?

Cheers,
--R

[1] Any database is fine, as long as it's not the one that the wikis
lock up each night... :P