Re: [wtp-incubator-dev] WTP Update Site for Milestones/Incubator

[David M Williams <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> So if somebody installs XSLT from the milestone update site 
> (currently version 1.1.0), he has to go forever with that update 
> site because during the update the same site will be used. So this 
> will work well for internal people, early adopters, beta testers, 
> etc. So updating will always bring the latest milestone release. As 
> I understand this there is 1 milestone release every 6 weeks. 
> (Correct me if I am wrong.)

Right so far. 


> For people that want only major stable releases, they will stick to 
> the main Webtools update site. So they are getting now version 1.0.
> 2. Any update will not bring new versions until the next WTP 
> release. As I understand, there is 1 major release every year 
> snchronized with the Main Eclipse releases. (Correct me if I am wrong.)

Not quite right. There is one yearly release, and it has two scheduled, 
coordinated maintenance releases: fourth Friday of September and February. 


As a project, we can decide to have other, extra releases off-cycle to fix 

other relatively large collection of bugs. These are case-by-case. 

Patches are a little different than maintenance releases and there are two 

type of patches. They are both done with "patch features" and ideally
replace only one jar. One type gets rolled out to everyone via the normal 
update site, but these are only for very bad "damaging" sorts of bugs, and 

require full review and PMC approval. Pretty rare. I think we've done it 
twice in our whole history. A second type of patch is done that is 
typically not for general users but instead are for bugs which committers 
want to fix in some adopter use. This is documented at 
http://wiki.eclipse.org/WTP_Patches

> 
> In both cases, how does the patching work?
> a) for stable release (for sure we find bugs in a one-year timeframe),
> b) for milestone release (some "premium customers" :) that report 
> bugs would like to have something to play with sooner than 6 weeks. 
> A timeframe of 2 weeks sounds resonable for milestone patch 
> releases). This milestone patching is important until the code 
> stabilizes because currently we expect the code to changes very quickly.
> 

Sounds like what you are talking about here are "I-builds". We do one of 
those about every week leading up to a milestone build. I should 
emphasize, 
these I-builds and milestones are only for committers and early testers, 
since the code has not been formally released and has no long term 
commitment. See also 
http://wiki.eclipse.org/WTP/Build/WTP_Build_Types

> 
> And the last question: how are the milestone builds/patches uploaded
> on the update site servers?

Our releng team handles that. (i.e. me :) 

Everything I've said, above, primarily only applies to our non-incubating 
projects. The incubating ones are handled more on a case-by-case bases. 
Of course, one of the informal criteria for in incubating project to 
graduate is 
for them to act like the rest of the WTP projects. :) 

Feel free to ask more questions if I haven't answered every thing you 
need.