Now that Ben has made the nightly builds available online it might make sense to move away from our current nominally release based distribution model to one based on just making the actively developed version of IMP more readily available.
To make it clearer what I mean, the model would look something like:
- some set of current and historical nightly test results are publicly available on line such that one can
- check how the nightly tests went for a given night
- if they were satisfactory, easily update your svn to that version or download the corresponding pre-built binary
- large rearrangements of modules should be preformed by creating a new module (eg domino2 or multifit2) and working on that new module then merging the changes back in to the main module (or replacing it wholesale).
- we perhaps include a periodically updated pointer to a stable version to use for people who don't want to think too much about it
Basically, this is a formalization of what we are already doing, with a few extra features:
- multiple versions of the nightly builds available
- saving of the nightly test results
- moving of the svn version associated with the nightly test results to a more prominent place in the page
- links from the nightly test results to the corresponding downloads
- a link somewhere to one of the nightly build pages as the current "stable" version (and, perhaps, a corresponding svn tag so that someone can fetch it from svn without thinking too much)
Good? Bad? Scary?