The Future of Continuous Integration in GNOME

This year is the first edition of RelEng: The International Workshop on Release Engineering. Germán presented our paper The Future of Continuous Integration in GNOME. Its full bibliographic entry is:

Walters, C., Poo-Caamaño, G., & German, D. M. (2013). The Future of Continuous Integration in GNOME. In The International Workshop on Release Engineering, RELENG 2013 (pp. 33–36).

This paper is a description of the new method to deploy releases in GNOME in a manner that uses a version control model. The goal is to make it easy to deploy (and equally important) rollback releases of the entire desktop.

This is its Bibtex entry:

@inproceedings{dmg2013-relenggit,
  title={The Future of Continuous Integration in GNOME},
  author={Colin Walters and Germán Poo-Caamaño and Daniel M. German},
  booktitle={The International Workshop on Release Engineering, RELENG 2013},
  year={2013},
  month= {May},
  pages = {33--36},
}

and this its abstract:

In Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects based on Linux systems, the users usually install the software from distributions. The distributions act as intermediaries be- tween software developers and users. Distributors collect the source code of the different projects and package them, ready to be installed by the users. Packages seems to work well for managing and distributing stable major and minor releases. It presents, however, various release management challenges for developers of projects with multiples dependencies not always available in the stable version of their systems. In projects like GNOME, composed of dozens of individual components, devel- opers must build newer versions of the libraries and applications that their applications depend upon before working in their own projects. This process can be cumbersome for developers who are not programmers, such as user interaction designers or technical writers. In this paper we describe some of the problems that the current distribution model presents to do continuous integration, testing and deployment for developers in GNOME, and present ongoing work intended to address these problems that uses a git- like approach to the building and deployment of applications.

Here is the presentation:

papers, research