[Releasing] Testing and verification of Alpha package

[Carsten Munk]

15. mar. 2012 03.37 skrev  <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.
For good measure, you asked for comments on the release and here they are.

I don't expect this issue to hold back the alpha release, but if we
want to see Qt5 all over the place, keep in mind that those exact
issues are also seen by integrators of Qt5 -- distributions don't want
to have one humongous build job blocking everything else. People have
CI systems for Qt-based products as well :)

In MeeGo, the giant size/length of the qt build was a serious problem
for integration speed. Even Qt + QtWebKit combination is tipping over
many build hosts in distributions these days, for 4.8.0.

My main point, however, is that I've yet to see anyone actively
package Qt5 from a giant tarball.

Some examples of those that do split up :

http://wiki.qt-project.org/Qt_5_on_Nokia_N9

QtOnPi was last seen using qt5base.spec and splitting each module into
a seperate package

https://gitorious.org/modular-qt-specwork/modular-qt-specs

Even JIRA talks about using individual source packages:
https://bugreports.qt-project.org/browse/QTQAINFRA-332

>
> 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.
Agreed, but keep in mind that there will be people trying to package
up the alpha as they do want to test and experiment with Qt5, with the
alpha as a initial point for products and other things, because Qt5 is
sometimes a bit of a nightmare to follow on when it comes to packaging
:)

And any temporary method of releasing has a tendency to become a
permanent one, hence why I'm raising this issue early. I don't expect
you to hold the presses, testing is after all the most important thing
to do. But I do hope the individual-tarball-per-module issue will be
taken into consideration as beta comes around.

>
>
>> 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

/Carsten