Nightly Build

[Friedrich2]

Version 0.82 needed eighteen months to be completed. It is wonderful that so many people did invest great efforts, nevertheless, I would prefer to always have the newest bug fixes. Travis CI seems to be not available for free, therefore I propose to offer a nightly build (jar file) under a tag "Nightly build." What do you think?

[sylvainhalle]

I completely understand, and I am very pleased with your proposal. Concretely, how would you like to proceed?

[Friedrich2]

Imho, there are two steps needed:

• Change Travis CI to build every night

• If the build completed successfully, present the result to the user.

How to "present" the resulting build concretely? At first, delete the old message tagged as "Nightly Build" (if existent) here.
You are using a linear release protocol here. Thus, I see two options:

Create automatically a new message above that one tagged as "Latest release", which describes the Nightly Build. This new message has to contain

the binary files made by Travis CI
the id of the latest commit which Travis CI used to compile the binary files.
(optionally) a concatenated list of all commit messages since the "Latest release" to give an overview of what was changed.

Additionally, tag the newly created message as "Nightly build".

Place the previously described new message under the "Latest release" message. On the one hand, when choosing this option, no user will download by accident a Nightly build. On the other hand, the Nightly build might be not spotted, therefore the "Latest Release" message should refer to the "Nightly build" message, e. g. by stating "We offer a Nightly build too. Please scroll down."

[sylvainhalle]

So far I configured Travis for weekly builds and created a "weekly build" release. Following the instructions the next commit (which I just pushed) should deploy the JAR file to that release. Let's see what happens...

[sylvainhalle]

Nope, I don't think it worked

[Friedrich2]

Well done! Now, the source code files seem to have been added successfully.
Only two really minor issues:
1.) The file sonar-project.properties contains "sonar.projectVersion=0.8.2" as line 5. Is this o. k. or will it lead to problems? (i suppose not)
2.) The message of the commit tagged as "weekly" is:

"weekly

Integration of snippet for emacs in Readme (#186)".

But there were more commits since 0.8.2, see here. The only commit message included was that of one created Aug 22, 2021. Was this intended?

[sylvainhalle]

Is it possible that it only shows the last commit message?

And I see that it did not deploy the jar file, which I suspect is what we'd like and not the source files.

[Friedrich2]

You are right, in a very weak moment I forgot that a jar file is needed.
Yes, it is the last commit message (seen from the time point of "Weekly build"). What is the best modus operandi: displaying only this one or all since the latest "Weekly build" or all since the latest release?

[sylvainhalle]

The best would be to include all messages since last official release. Can this be done automatically?

[Friedrich2]

I assume that you are working with Git. From my point of view, the problem consists of two subunits:

1. Find the latest commit tagged with "v...". Here, this site describes git commands which could help. Save the tag or id into . Maybe you are in need of grep or something similar for post-processing.
2. Concatenate all commit messages between the commit and HEAD. To do this, use git log --pretty="%h - %s (%an)" <TAG>...HEAD or git log --pretty=online <TAG>...HEAD Please note that I did not test it, so a test will be necessary.

[Friedrich2]

By accident, I recently found that vim offers a rather similar tag: here. Perhaps it can help us with the issue.

[Friedrich2]

Github Automatic Releases seem to be the right thing: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/automatic-releases