[Libreoffice-qa] Updater improvements

[Robinson Tryon]

Cloph - Thoughts?

On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 3:22 AM, Robinson Tryon
<bishop.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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