Testing release repository after completion

[wjwwood]

Bloom tutorials should detail how to test a release repository before push to the farm.

Better yet, bloom should offer to check the state of the release repository before pushing and updating the rosdistro file, but this might be in the farther future.

[ahornung]

Some ideas: Catch obvious errors so that the build farm has less to do in these "easy" cases.

• Check the syntax of package.xml (typos), if that's not already done in bloom
• Test building (+unit tests) the source package on the current platform. This catches e.g. the usual "forgot to check in file X" error.

[wjwwood]

The package.xml is parsed by catkin_pkg several times in bloom, so that is checked.

Building and running unit tests should happen before release, aka pre-release. I do not think this is bloom's responsibility, but rather the role of a continuous integration system.

[ahornung]

The building does not need to be done by bloom, a simple line in the tutorials would suffice to tell users how to compile from the source package before pushing. Otherwise the turnaround time for a single error could be 24h on the build farm. If I forgot to add 3 files to my repo then this will take three days to fix and get a proper release out, whereas it could be caught locally almost immediately (while taking away unnecessary load of the build farm).

[aleeper]

Has this been addressed? The release process with pre-release test builds is still not clear. http://www.ros.org/wiki/release tells people to go look at bloom for releasing catkin stacks, but the bloom page doesn't mention anything about build tests.

In any case, I agree with Armin. It's taken me 3 days to attempt a new package release.