Nightly ganga releases

Main idea

As the first-data analysis rush draws nearer, experience from user support shows that our software is prone to minor, easily fixable but annoying bugs, or to suddenly breaking because things change under our feet. This is mostly just a consequence of the complexity of the tools we're trying to bridge, but it needs attention.

We're going to need a fast turnaround for minor fixes, if we're to provide a stable tool. For this, a nightly release and minor nightly test framework would be very useful, and also quick and easy to set up.

Proposal

• Set up ssh keys from gangage to gangaat, gangalb (b/c of config file generation - see below)
• Set up a cron job on gangage that runs at 03:00 every night, probably on a MyProxy-enabled machine
• This cron job will:
  • define a release name NIGHTLY-YYMMDD
  • go through cvs, find the latest tag for all packages (not HEAD)
  • put these in /afs/cern.ch/sw/ganga/www/developers/tags/data/NIGHTLY-YYMMDD as is done by ganga-tags-merge today
  • Make the release NIGHTLY-YYMMDD, just as for todays prereleases
  • Generate gangage config file
  • Run ssh gangaat@lxplusNOSPAMPLEASE.cern.ch gen_atlas_config_file.sh to gen the atlas config, similar for lhcb
  • Commit config files
  • If we get this far, delete the release NIGHTLY-(YYMMDD - one week)
  • Start the gangage testing
• Set up a cron job on gangaat, gangalb that runs at 03:30 every night, doing:
  • Set up newly created NIGHTLY-YYMMDD
  • Run the testing framework for this account
• A final cron job on gangage that runs at 15.00 every day
  • Generate the test summary web page

-- BjornS - 16 Jun 2009