What artifacts to save for a released build?

Question

So, I now know what to save from nightly builds. What about when I give something to customers?

For example, I probably want to save debugging information (e.g. PDB).

What else?

Answer 1

Trace messages don't necessarily need to be generated by default but the possibility to enable them can be very helpful.

Answer 2

We use:

• installers
• binaries
• pdbs
• tag of source files
• any other source files that might not be in svn - for example config.status
• build log

You made me wonder if I'm missing anything important

Answer 3

• Compiler and library version information (it may not be part of the build log). Somebody else mentioned the whole binaries.
• Linker map file (it can sometimes help the remote debugging of a problem).
• Unstripped executable (if on a Unix system you strip it the executable before making it available to clients).

Answer 4

Results and Information generated from ATPs that are run on the build (probably as part of the build process).

Answer 5

For the SDK releases we do include:

• PDB and XML for the libraries (packaged with the latest snapshot of the samples)
• Packaged snapshot of sources from SVN (just because we can)
• Link to the online documentation (docs are generated from the source automatically)