[asterisk-dev] Unstable releases lately

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 10:27:51AM -0600, John Lange wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 09:45 -0600, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> > John Lange wrote:
> > > Back at Fall Von 2007, during the BOF session the topic of having a
> > > daily SVN snapshot available for download was raised and there seemed to
> > > be agreement that this was a good idea.
> > 
> > Unless these were distributed as patches, it would actually take far
> > longer for a user to download a snapshot tarball than to just run 'svn
> > update' on an existing checkout.
> 
> That misses the point. It's certainly has nothing to do with download
> speed.
> 
> SVN is relatively hard to use compared to a tarball especially since it
> isn't installed by default on many distros.
> 
> If SVN is the "be-all-end-all" then why do you have any tarballs? Might
> as well use SVN for everything.

Is it, indeed?

Could you please write to me robust instructions for building a Asterisk 
from a tarball? Don't forget the download and extraction part. And don't
forget the part about the pre-requirements. So in addition to the build
requirements of gcc, ncurses and openssl, you also have an extra package
called "subversion". The names sounds bad indeed, but "ncurses" isn't
exactly politically-correct either.

Subversion has indeed some intersting capabilities for branching and
such. But for the purpose of "building from source" all you really need
to know is:

  svn checkout
  svn update

You messed something? You delete it, and update again. You messed
something big? delete and checkout all over again. Or move aside and
checkout all over again. No need to keep 10 different snapshot tarballs
around.

There are indeed some cool options to see if you have local changes, and
what they are. And to switch to a different branch. And to switch to a
specific revision. And to get the difference from a specific revision.
But you don't need either of them to build form source. 


And what have you gained? You can test fixes immediately. No need to
download extra 10MB, extract them, reconfigure them and rebuild them. 
Would you even bother? You would try to batch as many fixes as possible
in a single updates cycle.

But with an svn branch all you need is:

  svn update
  make

And you can give immediate feedback. This makes regression testing much 
more effective.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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