[Gluster-devel] nightly builds are available again, with slightly different versioning

[Niels de Vos]

This is sort of an RCA and notification to anyone interested in using
nightly builds of GlusterFS. If you have any (automated) tests that
consume the nightly builds for non-master branches, you did not run
tests with updated packages since 2 May 2019. The nightly builds failed
to run, but nobody was notified or reported this.

Around two weeks ago the nightly builds for glusterfs of the non-master
branches were broken due to a change in the CI script. This has been
corrected now and a manual run of the job shows green balls again:
  https://ci.centos.org/view/Gluster/job/gluster_build-rpms/

The initial breakage was introduced by an optimization to not download
the whole glusterfs git repository, but only the current HEAD. This did
not take into account that 'git checkout' would not be able to switch to
a branch that was not downloaded. With a few iterations of fixes, it
became obvious that also tags were not fetched (duh), and 'git describe'
would not work. Without tags it is not possible to mark builds with the
most recent minor release that was made of a branch. Currently the date
of the build + git-hash is part of the package version. That means that
there is a new version of each branch every day, instead of only after
commits have been merged. This might be changed in the future...

As a reminder, the YUM .repo files for the nightly builds can be found
at http://artifacts.ci.centos.org/gluster/nightly/

Cheers,
Niels