Build and Integration schedule -- skip weeks

[Xiomara Jayasena]

Joe Darcy wrote:
> 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."

This would seem like the best approach to me as well.

-Xiomara

>
> -Joe
>