Difference between revisions of "Nightly Tarball"

Revision as of 21:04, 28 May 2011

What is it?

The (somewhat incorrectly named) Nightly Tarball contains the latest version of Geeklog, directly off of our Mercurial repository. This version should only be used for testing - it is not ready for use on a real website.

The Nightly Tarball is bundled just like a proper Geeklog release, i.e. you can download and unpack it and then simply follow the installation instructions.

Important: Please keep in mind that the Nightly Tarball is just a snapshot of the current state of Geeklog development. Some things may not be working, features may be missing or may be removed before an official release.

How to get it

You can get the Nightly Tarball from this URL:

http://project.geeklog.net/nightly/geeklog-nightly.tar.gz

Alternatively, you can also get it directly from Jenkins:

http://project.geeklog.net:8080/job/geeklog-nightly/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/geeklog-nightly.tar.gz

Both archives should always be identical.

Why it's not nightly

Originally, the Nightly Tarball was really only created once during the night. Having a "nightly build" available is a tradition in software development - it's useful for testing or to allow users to play with new features early.

However, sometimes you simply want to have that latest version much earlier. We could simply create the tarball after each commit to our repository. Since creation of the tarball puts some load on the server, we settled on a compromise and create it every hour (but only when something did actually change in the repository). If required, we could probably create it more often, though.

Well, and the name "Nightly Tarball" stuck, mostly out of tradition.