Hallo Frank,
You wrote:
Why isn't it possible to have a recent download via CVS or snapshots on a daily basis? Why is it that difficult with GPC?
For all I can tell, this would cause even more confusion because such snapshots most of the time are even less stable to unusable. (Especially these years, when we're fixing a lot of fundamental problems which involve bigger changes. Perhaps it will be different a few years from now when things will roll along nicely with small, localized and independent changes, but that's always a nice dream, and I don't know if/when we'll ever get there.)
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That is what CVS is good for, you checkout the source, modify it, test it and make it usable and when all work is done, you check your changes in, I don't need a repository where broken code is archived, it should be possible to build sources from CVS every time one checks it out of course. Unstable code does not belong in a repository.
Now if these intermediate versions were available to the public, I'd expect a lot of bug reports, and I'd probably be busy for the next few weeks reading through them, suggesting partial fixes or work-arounds, and not getting to fix the real problems since my time is also limited.
CVS is not thought as working directory, you work in your sand-box and if it runs ok. there, you'll update the CVS tree on the server to get more feedback.
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I know that other projects make daily snapshots. But (a) they usually have more developers (we're currently bascially two developers, Waldek and me, and some occasional contributors) and (b) IME they often have a "slightly different" attitude to bug reports (i.e., if they can't reproduce it immediately, or they think it's not important they just ignore it -- or let it gather dust in a bug database which to me often appears like "Ablage P" in German ...)
If you would make a working CVS repo available then probably more developers will join in? Hopefully you'll find some volunteer who will host a CVS repository and makes it available to the public (I'm sorry, I cannot do this).
Sorry for this little rant, but to make it short: If you mean why I don't make daily snapshots: I don't have the time and I don't like to. If you mean anyone else: Just go ahead and tell us the name of your download server (you can write to gpc-announce, of course) ...
No problem here.
You only need to setup a cron job which does all the work once, all the snapshots are generated automatically then;-)
Gerrit