Comment 26 for bug 607961

On Jun 24, 2011, at 4:53 PM, Robert Collins wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 8:39 AM, Gary Poster <email address hidden> wrote:
>> I thought I was done and was preparing an MP, but no: we do not generate
>> the WADL on the central box before we push out. This means that the
>> ETag scheme I had planned won't work. The obvious fix is to check in
>> the WADL, which will be a win for building new branches, and we are
>> already generating wadl in test runs so we can use that sunk cost to
>> also check that the WADL that is checked in is the same as what would be
>> generated.
>
> The wadl is pretty big; I'd -really- rather not check it in.

Why not? I don't feel strongly about it, but I don't understand why it's a bad idea yet.

> Generating the wadl on our central box is easy.

I had hoped that might be the case, but that was not what I saw.

Right now, we only build the eggs on the central box. The way we build the wadl right now requires much more of the build to exist on the central box (sourcecode and mailman, for a start).

Other parts of the build, such as mailman integration, have caused problems when copied from the central box. In my experience, changing what is built and copied is difficult to qa properly, and has been a cause of problems in the past. Our staging/qa infrastructure has been insufficient for these changes, at least the way I and others have handled them in the past. I consider these sorts of changes to be a high risk. I want to make this change as small as possible.

We could generate the wadl on our central box and then try to remove the risky parts that we created for the wadl generation, but that's fragile and not compelling.

Options such as changing how our wadl is initially created, or how our build is done, might be valuable, but in my opinion should be well out of scope for fixing this critical bug.

Maybe you can change my mind? :-)