[Boost-docs] Decoupling documentation builds from release management

Subject: [Boost-docs] Decoupling documentation builds from release management
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-12-10 13:21:29

Documentation builds are currently done as part of the daily snapshot
build. The snapshot is the basis for releases when the release date
rolls around. The snapshots are build on my personal machine, and that
means the doc builds have to work on my personal machine. Because of
toolchain issues, that's been a constant headache for me.

One aspect of the headache cure is to make the doc build more
reliable, and make it easier to identify and diagnose build problems.
Daniel James and John Maddock are working on that now, and making good
progress.

Dave Abrahams has suggested that another aspect of the headache cure
could be to decouple doc builds from snapshots. I like that because
(1) the snapshot can run every day even if there are issues with the
doc build, (2) the snapshot can run on a machine that is already set
up to support the lengthy doc toolchain, and (3) the responsibility
for the doc build could move from me to those actually use the doc
build.

One way this could work is for Daniel, or someone else intimately
familiar with doc builds, to setup a chron job on their machine that
would update their working copy, do the build, zip up doc/html, and
put it on an ftp site. The snapshot build would download the doc/html
file, unzip it, and copy more recent files into the snapshot. It is
easy to set that up such that if some part of the process fails, the
snapshot simply uses the previous doc/html contents.

Comments?

--Beman