[cross-project-issues-dev] Re-spin process

[Pascal Rapicault <Pascal_Rapicault@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I see a great deal of re-spin happening for plenty of good reasons, however
do we have a "process" around those re-spins?
My interrogations mainly fall into two categories 1) what is the result 2)
process.

1 - Result
- What is the result of those re-spins? Is it Europa or Europa maintenance?
If it is Europa will we ever have a Europa maintenance, when do we consider
it is a maintenance?
- Are those re-spins put in place and lieu of where the Europa bytes were?
If I try to download all of Europa now, what do/should I get?
- Will mirrors have the new result and is there a chance that someone can
still get the "old" bytes?
- Are the EPP packages rebuilt and should they be?

2 - Process
- Respin: how long, why?
It seems to me that we are re-spinning because we want users downloading
the latest and greatest from Europa without going through an additional
update step (basically if we were not re-spinning, users would first have
to get Europa and then look for update to get the latest bug fixes). From
an end user point of view, this is really nice. Therefore my question is,
for how long we will keep re-spinning?
Will we re-spin every time a project has a new set of bytes to deliver?
Does that approach allow users to update from a copy of Europa they have to
the newest one?
- What is the frequency of those re-spin?
- What are the expectations from the team not contributing?
- Are the new bytes also made available as download on the project download
page? What is the name of these downloads?

Personally I like the approach where Europa is a just a name and the
content is a moving target representing the latest and greatest versions of
the 21 projects that initially contributed until Ganymede ships. Of course
it is harder for developers to know which versions of a plug-in someone was
using, but the benefits for the community seems to be pretty high, and it
also means that we regularly re-spin putting a higher burden on the
coordinator. It is also harder to do the integration testing since pieces
can release at different schedule.

What do you think?

PaScaL