[Kde-scm-interest] [Kde-extra-gear] Git and the future of scripts to create extragear tarballs

[Eike Hein]

On 07/30/2010 09:48 PM, José Manuel Santamaría Lema wrote:
> IIRC I asked some time ago in IRC to Konversation guys how they where generating 
> tarballs and someone pointed me this:
> https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~apachelogger/+junk/release-script-refactor

That's Amarok's release script, which Konversation doesn't use.

The Konversation case is a bit convoluted. Back in the KDE 3 days
there was a svn2dist Perl script which could fetch sources and
translations from SVN and produce a tarball. This script would
take a parameter with a list of translations to exclude.

Konversation only ships translations that meet a certain percen-
tage of completeness. So I wrote my own bash script that could
fetch translations, calculate their completeness percentage, run
a few tests that SVN didn't run automatically as post-commit hooks
back then (msgfmt -c and check_po_files) and produced a list of
bad translations I could feed into svn2dist.

With KDE 4 came the move to create_tarball.rb. This script doesn't
support ommitting translations anymore. So I extended my script
to manipulate the directory created by create_tarball.rb and then
roll the tarball.

Then game the move to git, which made create_tarball.rb useless.
At this point I wrote a C++ Qt command line application which
takes the place of create_tarball.rb and my earlier bash scripts
and does it all.

Amarok's script does similar things. KOffice has one as well,
iirc.

So yeah, lots of duplicated effort between us all. I guess
every maintainer naturally writes something to automate their
release tasks at some point. Would be nice to unify that effort.

I haven't used Amarok's script so I can't comment on it (just
like create_tarball it's Ruby, which I don't like, so I knew
I wouldn't like it if I had to modify it).

My C++ Qt app works, but I have a hunch nobody is going to like
having to compile their release tool, and since I had never in-
tended to share the code, it's not really a beauty either.

If it works I don't care that it's in Ruby, so extending Amarok's
script might be a good move, dunno.


-- 
Best regards,
Eike Hein