Some of you might know that James and Gene have spent a lot of time assembling a "nightly build server" for the FlightGear project. This monitors the git repository for any source code changes and then spawns builds for windows, linux, and the mac.
http://flightgear.simpits.org:8080/
This is really great work and a huge contribution to the FlightGear project.
Unfortunately, to run a nightly build from the build server, you still have to pull the latest data tree from the git repository. That's not all that hard once you work through the details, but it's a bit "fiddly" for some folks.
So I have been playing around with creating a developer's snapshot release which would be similar to our official release. It's one big setup.exe that includes all the programs and the data. I am hopeful that this will eventually make the current development version of FlightGear more accessible for "joe average" users which would then in term hopefully give us more feedback and bug reports ahead of our official release.
None of this would be possible without the "hudson" build server that Gene and James setup.
There are a couple things I've done with this snapshot package:
- I've assigned a unique app name of the form: FlightGear YYYYMMDD so you can have multiple versions installed concurrently and they don't step on each other and don't step on the official release. If people maintain multiple snapshots installed on their systems, that might help narrow down when a bug was introduced.
- I've included oalinst.exe (openal installer) and vcredist_x86.exe ... neither of these may be required in the long term if we can just ship the needed dll's, but that probably needs further testing.
- I've dipped my toe in the world of "open-candy". This is a software recommendation system that I'm sure will generate some discussion on it's own. With all this mess going on lately with pro-flight-sim doing ad blitzes around the internet I'd like to take a look at open-candy as a possible revenue source to fund our own advertising so we can battle back with a positive message. Perhaps if there are overwhelming voices of opposition to this idea, we could provide an alternate open-candy free version of the installer as an option for anyone who can't accept the open-candy usage terms. Personally I don't have a problem with open-candy, but I understand that others might. Anyway, I don't even know yet if this will generate enough revenue to even be useful, but I'd like to test it out and see what happens.
I've pushed out the setup image to the ftp mirrors. Here is a direct link if you want to go start downloading now. I haven't linked this from the main web site yet ... I'd like to get some feedback first from folks if they try it.
http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/ ... 101219.exe
Does it basically work? Are there any major packaging blunders? Please note, FlightGear bugs and feature request should still be handled through normal channels. But I am interested in packaging issues right now.
Thanks!
Curt.