I noted earlier today that I've made 5 releases of Solar in 7 days. (Clearly I'm a fan of \"release early, release often.\" ;-) Obviously, I have the Solar-talk subscribers to thank for pointing out bugs and and making functionality requests; these are what drive the need for a release ... thanks, guys. :-)
\nBut what I want to talk about in this entry is the release process itself. With the help of Greg Beaver (indirectly) and Clay Loveless (directly), Solar now has a moderate-length PHP script that handles almost all aspects of the release process automatically. Usage is at the command line; issue \"php release.php\" for a test run, or \"php release.php commit\" for a full release-and-commit cycle.
\nWith any luck, the lessons I've learned here will be of use to someone else; with more luck, perhaps someone else will see possible improvements and mention them here. Read on for a narrative of how the script came to be.
\n\nThe first person I have to thank here is Greg Beaver and his great work on the PEAR packaging and installation tools. Without his stewardship and maintenenance of this wonderful toolset, the Solar release process would be much more difficult than it is.
\nEven with the PEAR installer, though, building a package XML release file by hand is a terribly tedious exercise. So the second person I have to thank is Clay Loveless: some months ago, he wrote up the first iteration of the auto-packager for Solar using PEAR_PackageFileManager. I added on a bit to it at that time so that we could keep release information (authors, change notes, etc) in a separate location.
\nThe point of keeping the relase info in a separate location was so we could avoid having to modify the packaging script for every release. The script looks for an \"info/\" directory; in that directory, there is a sub-directory for every release number, and contained therein are a number text and comma-separated values files. The packaging script then uses those files to generate the \"header\" portions of the PEAR pacakge file. You can see an example \"info/\" directory here.
\nThe PEAR_PackageFileManager has a great auto-replacement utility built in. It can look through the source code at installationpackage time and replace certain keywords, such as \"@package_version@\", with the proper value for that particular installation. (UPDATE: [19:33 CST] Greg Beaver pointed out that addGlobalReplacement() does replace at package-time. Once again, Greg proves he has thought of all the right things. Thanks man.)
But there's a small problem with that for non-PEAR users. Because the replacements happen at installation-time, not at package-time, it means the pearball still has the keywords in place, not the actual values. For methods like Solar::apiVersion() which depend on the automated replacement of \"@pacakge_version@\" with the correct version number, this is a functionality break for them.
It turns out there's an easy, if somewhat brute-force, solution: copy the original source to a temporary location, replace keywords yourself, and then have PEAR package that new codebase with the keywords pre-replaced. You can see this portion of the code in release.php at the comment noted \"prepare package directory\".
\nWe copy the original source (\"src/\") to a packaging directory (\"pkg/\") and str_replace() keywords in the new \"pkg/\" directory. When PEAR_PackageFileManager comes into play, it works on the \"pkg/\" directory instead of the original source. Note also that the pre-replacements happen in documentation files as well (more on that in a bit).
The end result of this is a pearball/tarball that is equally useful to PEAR and non-PEAR installation processes.
\nSo that takes care of the packaging itself. The last issues to handle are mostly administrative. On a full commit cycle, we need to check a few things before rolling the release:
\nIf those pre-flight checks pass, we then need to actually build the package (see iterations 1 and 2 above). After that:
\nThe release.php script splits this into three task sets.
\nFirst, the administrative tasks are handled at the top of the script under \"status check\". This sets keywords, builds docs, etc., and then makes sure that there weren't any changes as a result. If these automated tasks generated changes (as noted by \"svn status\" returning any ouput at all), the script terminates with a warning to handle outstanding issues.
\nSecond, after the package is built, near the end of the script, we issue a series of \"svn\" commands to tag the release and commit to the repository.
\nFinally, we unzip a copy of the pearball and pull out a copy of the docs; these are re-zipped in a separate tarball for upload to the Solar site. We use the packaged docs instead of the source docs so we don't get all the .svn files mixed in with them.
\nThere are still some manual tasks to accomplish in a release, but they're easy: upload the pearball to the channel server, upload the docs to the website ... oh, and write an entry about the release on my blog. ;-)
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