Build and Integration schedule -- skip weeks

[Joe Darcy]

On 05/08/09 02:29 PM, Xiomara Jayasena wrote:
>
>
> Joe Darcy wrote:
>> On 05/08/09 02:12 PM, Xiomara Jayasena wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Joseph D. Darcy wrote:
>>>> Xiomara Jayasena wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> There is no really point in doing a promotion if nothing has 
>>>>> changed.  Would a link for the skipped build to the previous build 
>>>>> number suffice, instead?
>>>>
>>>> The appropriate state of the source code in the repositories should 
>>>> also be tagged for both builds in this situation.
>>>>
>>>> Basically, places where people get the build from, source, 
>>>> binaries, etc., should have a conceptual link from the skipped 
>>>> build to the prior one.
>>>
>>> In the long term the above could become quite confusing.
>>> I do not quite understand the need to skip build numbers or 
>>> re-build.  I believe in the past RE has done neither, we just update 
>>> whatever documents need to be updated.
>>>
>>> I can see that publishing a calendar in advance and knowing what 
>>> build number to target for, is very useful for gatekeepers, so if we 
>>> must do one of the two options above then skipping numbers maybe the 
>>> best alternative, from RE's perspective.
>>
>> I find skipped build numbers to have a very high long-term cognitive 
>> cost.  Nine months, or a year or two years after JDK7 m3 when someone 
>> is trying to track down in which build a bug was introduced, how 
>> likely is it that he or she will remember, "Ah yes, b60 was skipped 
>> because that was the stopper build for JDK 7 m3 and there were no 
>> problems to fix!"  Missing build numbers create questions rather than 
>> answers and complicate attempts to perform things like binary search 
>> on the builds.
>>
>> I think the set of build numbers should be a dense sequence of 
>> consecutive integers.  There are multiple ways of achieving this and 
>> I don't have a strong preference between:
>>
>> * Rename b61 as b60 if m03 doesn't need a stopped build
>
> Renaming in RE terms translates to re-building.

By renaming in this context, I mean to update the schedule documents so 
that the first build of m04 would be called "b60" rather than "b61."

-Joe