Baby steps towards more frequent major releases

[Pavel Sanda]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 02:42:52PM -0700, Joel Kulesza wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 2:16 PM Jean-Marc Lasgouttes <lasgouttes at lyx.org>
> wrote:
> 
> > Le 26/11/2022 ?? 21:17, Scott Kostyshak a écrit :
> > > 5. We should produce snapshot binaries (i.e., testing releases that
> > >     aren't necessarily at a stage with criteria) more frequently. This is
> > >     especially helpful for platform-specific bugs so we can ask the
> > >     reporter if they can reproduce with the latest test release.
> >
> > It would actually be great to have nightly builds produced by the CI
> > platform. I am sure this is doable for several of our platforms. But of
> > course somebody has to set it up.
> >
> 
> As part of my Gitlab explorations, I could take a look at this as well.
> Does anyone have the "cookbook steps" used to build out LyX distributions
> (starting with Linux) to encode in the CI?

Well, the release cookbok is here: https://wiki.lyx.org/Devel/ReleaseProcedure
But that's mostly for creating proper tarballs and not for nighties.

Linux world has different packaging formats so you'd need to decide what 
you shoot for. We still have rpmdist target in makefile but its unmaintained
for so long that I doubt it will work correctly. I offered more frequent 
debian packages in users list some time ago and got zero feedback from
users so my conclusion was: waste of time. And it makes sense because
for those who know how to get packages from specific repositories is
building up to date lyx version just one or two commands away...

Where it would be perhaps more useful is Windows/Mac platforms,
but esp. in Win world we are nowhere close to an automatic builds
(am I correct Eugene?)

Pavel