[Scummvm-devel] Idea: ScummVM weekly snapshots

[Lothar Serra Mari]

Hello my dear adventurers!

A few weeks ago, I had the idea to replace (or extend) the current
nightly/daily builds of ScummVM with weekly snapshot versions.

The idea is to create a snapshot build once a week and name it after
the current calendar week, so this week's snapshot would be named
"ScummVM 1.9.0_16w28". This is the way Minecraft testing works btw. :)

Basically, I see three benefits in the weekly snapshots:

a) Announcements are more precise: Currently, when a new engines is in
it's final stage of development, we usuall announce it with something
like "playable in the latest daily builds". This could lead to
confusion for inexperienced users, because it is not *exactly* clear
which is the latest version at the time of writing. Writing "playable
with the upcoming ScummVM Snapshot 1.9.0_16w29 and newer" would solve
this.

b) Larger user base for game tests: When a new game, port or
significant change is announced, people will start testing it using
different daily versions because they won't start testing all at the
same time, therefore I assume that weekly instead of daily builds will
increase the user base for a specific release and thus increase the
chance of finding regressions.

c) Easier integration into the upcoming GAMESDB. We could simply add
each snapshot as a target in the GAMESDB and don't have to use
"tricks" like selecting 1.8.1 and then inserting the commit hash in
the comments.

c2) We could make a small announcement of the changes of the past week
on the website. Nothing special, but something I'd like to write ;)

On the downside, changes made during a week won't receive much testing
until the release of the next snapshot. This might be not too bad,
because the more experienced users still can compile the latest code.

I have no idea how easy it is to implement those weekly snapshots
using our current buildbot setup - do we need to do a branch each week
or is there a possibility to simply schedule a build on a specific
time and give this release it's own version string?

Please let me know what you think of this idea. Don't hesitate to call
it "stupid and utter nonsense". :)

With best regards
Lothar/rootfather