Ability to skip building staff client in make_release

[Jason Stephenson]

I have been running make_release a lot lately to build tarballs to install Evergreen on new production VMs. (I know I'm doing something not normally expected, but the script is really useful for this purpose.) I have had a number of updates to add, which means building new tarballs as issues with the installation files are addressed in git.

When making these tarballs, I skip building i18n and upgrade scripts, since I did both previously when I made the original tarball for our upgrade in October. The one step that make_release cannot skip is building XUL staff client download files. I don't need these because I'm not updating staff client code, nor am I changing versions. It would be nice if there were a way to skip building XUL staff clients.

I can see two ways to accomplish this:

The first is to add an explicit option to skip building XUL staff clients.

The second, and my preferred way, is to skip building XUL staff clients if the -j option is not provided. It turns out that the argument to -j is only used in building the XUL staff clients. I will post a branch that does this after testing it.

I mention both possibilities to facilitate discussion. Someone else may prefer the first option, but I find the second to be cleaner as it avoids adding yet another option to be documented. With option two, we just modify a few lines of code and change the option's help text.

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

Branch in is in working/user/dyrcona/lp1665933-make_release-skip-xul

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/dyrcona/lp1665933-make_release-skip-xul

Using -j still works and omitting -j skips building the staff client and saves several minutes of build time, particularly if -i is also used.

In case anyone is curious, I'm building my update/install tarballs with the following command line:

build/tools/make_release -b -i -v 2.10.7

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

Another reason to skip building the staff clients when you build a tarball: You plan to make updates clients when you install on you Evergreen server cluster.

Skipping the staff client is pretty much useful any time you're making a custom tarball.

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

I mildly prefer having an explicit flag for two reasons:

- future-proofing in case any other part of release-building comes to expect being able to find osrf_config
- it seems untidy to me to have to both not supply a switch _and_ fiddle with the PATH to ensure that a given action doesn't happen

Jason, if you're amenable to having an explicit flag, I'm willing to write a patch on top of yours to add it and testing it as part of beta release-cutting.

[Evergreen Bug Maintenance (bugmaster)]

Given this wishlist item's nature as a tarball-building and installation aid, I'm retargeting this to the RC.

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

I'm fine with adding an explicit switch. I figured this wouldn't be around for very long, since the XUL client should be going away soon.

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

I don't have time to write a patch to add the switch for the 2.12-rc today, but this sort of thing is reasonable to backport into 2.12.0 or 2.12.1 IMO.

[Jason Stephenson (jstephenson)]

Galen, et al.

I just pushed a new version of the working branch that takes an explicit option (-x) to skip the xul staff client build.

It's at user/dyrcona/lp1665933-make_release-skip-xul-take2

http://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/dyrcona/lp1665933-make_release-skip-xul-take2

I just used it to make a custom tarball and it works for me.

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

The user/gmcharlt/lp1665933_signoff branch contains a signoff and a follow-up updating the tool's help text.

[Ben Shum (bshum)]

Looks good, picked to master and backported to rel_2_12 and rel_2_11 for easier help for buildmasters and supporters of Evergreen releases.