Just been messing with the latest trunk build of reactos, stumbled upon something which would alliviate alot of headaches with the current 2.3 DEV releases. The reactos rbuild (buildbot) as some of you would know is an automated way of building the latest binaries for each DEV release with an automated system of delivering them via a very pretty GUI. In terms of adopting a similar policy of UFO AI it would give us a multitude of benefits:
Builds do not have to be manually built and all the latest releases are ready for download.
Instantanious releases.
Standardised build environment for all platforms (win32, linux, macosx).
If there is bug in the current release and it needs traced back, you could revert using the server to a previous SVN revision and click rebuild, from there you would have a compiled "instant download" section. This would be excellent for fault finding and testing without using a large amount of space for each achived release.
From a users stand point, they can get the latest dev release, without having to install compilers, dependancies and software onto their home machines. (Some users are not technical)
I thought it would be worth a discussion to weigh in the pros and cons of this, if so what are your thoughts.
If you like the idea what would we need in terms of hardware / software to make this possible? Does anyone have contact with anyone in Reactos "in the know" regarding how they set this up? Maybe it relates to a CRON job or server side compiler for the SVN? Obviously this is no easy feat but as mentioned earlier it is worth some discussion.
The reason for mentioning this is due to a lot of posts regarding "where can I download the latest release, etc.", "which site", "I do not like site (x) to download from". I am not sure if anyone has had any snow lepard issues which have been a major pain, but I have certainly had a few "EY!" moments (south african tone optional).
Now the flag has been raised, who is going to salute it?
