release-management

Is there any specification for promoting a release candidate?

I'm wondering this because it's just dawned on me that I've never been involved with a company the provided release candidates before and I see the term being used more and more these days so I would like to be a little more clear on their implications. For anyone who has actually worked for a company who provides RC's before...does the...

Problems using git diff to create file list for deploy

I want to use something like the following command to create a tarball to deploy: tar cjvf ~/deploy.tar.bz2 `git diff --name-only 0abc 1def` The inner git diff command produces a list of files with relative including the relative path when i run it separately. I'm running into two problems though, I need to be able to auto escape sp...

Do you have to deploy the .pdb file with compiling under release?

Do you have to deploy the .pdb file with compiling under release? Why does it even compile a .pdb when you do a release build anyway? ...

Excluding Page from Release Build in ASP.NET Project

I am using an "Inspector.aspx" to do some tests in my Debug build. In a Release build (and more importantly when creating an installer), I manually exclude the page (and it's related C# files) from the project. Is there a way to automatically exclude files in a selected solution configuration in an ASP.NET project? C++ projects giv...

How should release notes be written?

Is there any sort of guidelines or best practices on how release notes should be written? I guess I am trying to find the proper balance between making the point without being too specific. Also, do developer usually provide a much more release notes for QA team compare to the one submitted for public view? ...

Who's responsible for deployment?

Hi, I work as an in-house developer for a manufacturing company. We make software for the manufacturing process, not really control software, more like process flow. We are using a Scrum process to develop the software, albeit tailored to fit with our team and environment, and this is working quite well. We're coming to the end of a s...

What standards does your team enforce for a major-version code deployment?

I'm curious as to what sort of standards other teams make sure is in place before code ships (or deploys) out the door in major releases. I'm not looking for specific answers to each, but here's an idea of what I'm trying to get an idea of. For server-based apps, do you ensure monitoring is in place? To what degree...just that it resp...

Controlled Integration of Changes with Continuous Integration

I have a NSIS installer that we previously built using nAnt scripts that copy some files around and run makensis.exe via a exec task to build the installer exe. After the nant script completes, I have the compelte structure for our CD and also our download. I was just doing a get from sourcesafe onto an unused desktop and using it as a...

Proper usage of Tags in SCM

My co-workers and I are having an argument over the value and usage of Tags in release/SCM systems. We're looking to the StackOverflow community to put in their thoughts to help us resolve the issue. One side claims that Tags are a valuable addition to release management. An example of their use: we do a Maven release, which makes a new...

Maven release via Hudson

I'm setting up Hudson to use the batch-task plugin to do maven releases to our internal repository. I'm doing it via: mvn --batch-mode release:prepare mvn --batch-mode release:perform I'm interested in other methods people have used and the pros and cons of those methods. Also, any gotchas people have come across. ...

Release engineering: what books?

A part of my daily job can be described as release-engineering stuff and I'd like to keep on improving my knowledge+skill even on that specific field. Are there other books besides the 3 ones listed on Wikipedia ("releng" entry -> "further reading") What are your favourite ones on this topic? Please, no generic/all-inclusive/2k-page...

Product management & assembly versions.

We are approaching the initial release of a new product at our company, and I am trying to determine the best method of managing the versions of all of the different components and cross referencng those components with the marketing department version of our software. For various reasons, marketing has determined that the initial relea...

One big release or several small ones?

When you're working on enhancements to an existing line of business application, do you think it's better to batch up changes into less frequent bigger releases, or continually ship new features in smaller releases? Assuming there are hardware upgrades or database upgrades, do you make these changes with the releases as well, or keep the...

What strategies exist for managing updates across multiple sub-products and multiple releases?

We have a product that has multiple extensions that ship with it, each of which has its own version number. (Specifically we have a xulrunner application with multiple extensions). The extension manager for xulrunner provides an update functionality so that it will call a function any time the version number of that extension has incre...

Determining the date of tag creation in Bazaar.

Using Bazaar: Is it possible to determine the date of when a revision was tagged? This will be useful for determining when code was released. Note, I'm not too interested in the date of the tagged revision, but rather when the revision was tagged. ...

How do I enable undo in eclipse ant editor?

Undo is not working for me in ant editor in eclipse. When I press Ctrl-Z nothing happens. Is it possible to enable undo somehow or is this a bug? I am using Eclipse 3.4.2 (Ganymede) on Windows XP Professional. ...

When building a hosted/SAS application, how do you manage multiple versions when customizations by the customer are allowed?

Let's imagine you are building a Calculator application. You will allow customers to customize this Calculator with their own logos and CSS stylesheets. Customers will point their domains to your hosted Calculator and the application will serve up the correct theme for each customer. For example: www.AcmeCalculator.com will serve up th...

maintaining configuration differences between dev and live environments during deployment from SVN

We use the ExpressionEngine CMS (php) to create websites. For each site, we set up a subversion repository and commit the EE installation as well as any custom templates, images, javascript, etc. that are used. Included in the repository is the file containing all of the environment variables and the .htaccess file. We have a developmen...

Deploying a rails app to multiple locations

I'm trying to deploy the same rails app to two different locations with different app names, different logos, different stylesheets, etc. I've got the code working based on an APP_NAME and a HOST_NAME variable I store in environments/production.rb. Now I need to actually deploy it, and I need a better solution than manually editing the ...

Need primer for a Msbuild newbie

We maintain a medium sized windows application developed in vb/c# .net in work. Still now the build and deploy process for this app is manual. I am determined to make this process automated using MSBuild on which i have no knowledge still now. Our app has a simple build structure, set of projects already grouped into four solutions(.sln...