[neon] building test branches

[Harald Sitter]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 8:26 PM, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:
> Watching the video of my talk at FOSDEM (I'm not vain, it's for
> professional review)

mhmmm.. P

> Will asked an interesting question if someone
> wants to build a test branch they just wrote a patch for could Neon
> make packages of that for people to test with.  I said not currently
> vaguely near to that but it might be an interesting idea in future so
> posting it here as an aide memoir.

To also get some architecture thoughts on this. Jenkins standard
feature set is somewhat ugh WRT automatic branch detection and
building, in particular with how we build out job trees outside
jenkins and then push them onto the jenkins instances. I haven't
looked into it specifically but I do know that there is a plugin that
specifically allows jobs to basically build any branch of a repo, so
the job is glued to the repo and auto-discovers branches essentially.

The ultimate problem with this is that you would not know which
packaging to apply to it. Much more so if the patch also requires
packaging adjustments.

All that being said, I think in a world with container binaries this
becomes a vastly more solvable problem as packaging implications are
mostly none existent and the overall problem scope goes way done (e.g.
as it stands now you'd not have to worry about binary implications as
you could for example simply pull in a different runtime with your
patched app).

HS