[wp-hackers] On Subversion and 2.5.x-alpha not being in Trunk

[Joseph Scott]

On May 14, 2008, at 3:11 PM, Jeremy Visser wrote:

> On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 14:02 -0700, Aaron D. Campbell wrote:
>> I have a lot of WordPress installs that I manage, and it would
>> be nice to just set a cron job to "svn up" every day (or once a week,
>> etc). There is a trac ticket asking for a stable tag like phpMyAdmin
>> does: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3593
>
> I do that on a project of mine, and it's a pain in the butt to work.
>
> Already talked about it with Lloyd in private about 6 months ago,  
> and we
> were pretty conclusive that there's no way to make it easier on the
> developers.
>
> Not gonna happen.

Short of having a stable tag I think there are other things that  
could be done to help automate things.

http://api.wordpress.org/ provides a few services, like:

	http://api.wordpress.org/core/version-check/1.0/
	http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.0/

I'd suggest having:

	http://api.wordpress.org/current-version/1.0/

That would return one line that contained just the version string, if  
it were in place today it would return: 2.5.1
The version number would be a tag that could be used to checkout the  
source code from subversion.

Along with that would be something like:

	http://api.wordpress.org/current-branch/1.0/

Which would also only return one line, that contained the current  
branch, if it were in place today it would return: 2.5
Instead of a tag, it's a branch that could be checked out from  
subversion.

Please don't get hung up on the names in the URLs, they were just  
examples.  Any name/URL combination will do as long as it works as  
expected and was reasonably descriptive.

If you only wanted to update when a new version came out, you would  
query for the current version, svn switch to that tag, svn up and do  
any WP specific (like the database) updates that needed to happen.


--
Joseph Scott
joseph at randomnetworks.com
http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/