Consider automated creation of release?

[joslloand]

@dyfer added a GitHub Action to automate releases for atk-matrices and atk-kernels.

Would it be useful to consider something similar for atk-reaper?

[lossius]

I am not sure if it is as straightforward with releases of ATK for Reaper, in particular, the macOS installer has to be created on a Mac. I have local scripts (they are in the tools folder of the repository) for making the installers and these work well for me. I anyway like to test the release candidates on a separate and clean user account on my Mac as well as on Windows before properly releasing. If we were to ditch the macOS installer, it could be reconsidered.

Do you get any kind of download statistics for releases made available via GitHub?

[joslloand]

Do you get any kind of download statistics for releases made available via GitHub?

@dyfer, can you answer this?

[dyfer]

I am not sure if it is as straightforward with releases of ATK for Reaper, in particular, the macOS installer has to be created on a Mac. I have local scripts (they are in the tools folder of the repository) for making the installers and these work well for me.

GitHub runners are available with macOS, Windows and Linux images, so that shouldn't be a problem. Thanks for pointing out the scripts, that's helpful.

I anyway like to test the release candidates on a separate and clean user account on my Mac as well as on Windows before properly releasing. If we were to ditch the macOS installer, it could be reconsidered.

One way to address this in automated environment is to make a pre-release (release candidate), which would trigger artifact creation. If everything is fine, a new release is made with the updated version number and essentially the same code (new artifacts being automatically created at that time). Releases can be made in various ways, I usually just use the github web interface.

It's also possible to trigger automated build manually and have the artifacts created outside of the release, e.g. for testing.

Do you get any kind of download statistics for releases made available via GitHub?

Yes, though I'm not sure if this is an official github tool:

https://tooomm.github.io/github-release-stats/?username=ambisonictoolkit&repository=atk-reaper

(of course there are no statistics for this repo since there are no downloads available currently)

[lossius]

@dyfer Thanks. In this case, it can actually be quite worthwhile to pursue. Currently, I upload builds to Dropbox and use Bit.ly for short links. That gives some statistics, but with a free plan, they are fairly rudimentary and linked to my login account, so the statistics aren't available to others other than me.

The script for building the Windows install should be straightforward. In reality, this is just making a zipped archive, so this script could run on macOS as well. All file and folder paths are relative, so should work fine.

For the Mac installer, I am using Packages.app to create the installer. Whenever I do changes to the workload (the files to be installed), I do that in the app. There is a bug in the most recent version of Packages.app that limits the number of subfolders in a way that causes problems with the folder structure of atk-kernels. Version 1.1.2 works fine, so I have just remained with that older version.

When I create the actual installer I also use yoursway-create-dmg. This is set up as a git submodule. On line 19 of the build script I call /usr/local/bin/packagesbuild. I do not recall if this is standard installed with macOS, or if I did it myself. It does not seem to have been installed using Homebrew.

If you want to give it a go, @dyfer, please go ahead! I assume that I can also still run the current scripts locally for testing while in development.

[joslloand]

See also this comment: https://github.com/ambisonictoolkit/ambisonictoolkit.github.io/commit/d34432da949d8a1911fc17148d33a490cff024c7#commitcomment-74412588