[Releasing] Testing and verification of Alpha package

[marius.storm-olsen at nokia.com]

On 14/03/2012 14:05, ext Carsten Munk wrote:
> 14. mar. 2012 19.42 skrev<marius.storm-olsen at nokia.com>:
>> We are closing in on the alpha release, and it's time for
>> maintainers and others willing to help out to download and verify
>> that the package contents is good and ready for the release.
>>
>> http://releases.qt-project.org/alpha/20120314/qt-everywhere-opensource-src-5.0.0.tar.gz
>>(219MB)
>> or
>> http://releases.qt-project.org/alpha/20120314/qt-everywhere-opensource-src-5.0.0.zip
>>(255MB)
>>
> There has been a lot of time spent on making qt modular, partly
> because of distributions wanting to more sanely package Qt, to my
> knowledge.

The modularization project had two goals:

1) To make development of Qt easier, and quicker to test.
Qt was growing quite big, and for every change made, our CI system had 
to compile the who shebang, wasting precious cycles on unrelated code. 
By splitting the code into logical modules which were more independent, 
we can optimize the CI testing to the related module(s).
Also, much of the code in Qt progress at different pace. Some parts are 
more stable, and others more volatile. Having modules allows us to 
simply pick and choose each module at their stable state, and release a 
new Qt (SDK) based on that.

2) Allow for more easily creation of additional modules, both by Nokia 
and the community in general.
Everybody has their own interest, and by making it easier to create 
additional modules, the hope was or increase the vibrancy of the 
community and thus accelerate the adoption of Qt.


> Isn't it a bit of a regression to just provide one huge tarball in
> this case? It would be much more useful to provide qtbase,
> qtjsbackend, qtdeclarative seperately as tarballs so these can be
> packaged individually?

It wasn't the primary goal of modularization to release Qt in pieces. 
Though, once we are closer to a stable product, it might make sense that 
each module is its own little package. Once could certainly envision a 
light-weight Qt installers which has a list of modules you can 
check/uncheck based on your preference, and the installer only downloads 
what you need.

However, for the purpose of this Alpha release where we won't even have 
any binaries, I don't think we should focus on that and spend valuable 
cycles on trying to break it up into smaller tar-balls; certainly making 
it harder for the community to actually test the code.

So, IMO, please lets try to keep it simple for the Alpha, and release Qt 
as a single package and get full test of the thing. We really need 
everyone to test as much as possible of Qt to ensure that we get it 
stable and releasable for both a Beta and Final before summer.


> In addition to that, isn't the -5.0.0 versioning a bit misleading
> when this is just an alpha?

Yes, that's a mistake. It should have "alpha" in there somewhere.

-- 
.marius