GUB and updating the website

[Phil Holmes]

I'm sending this information as a mail message as a cheap and quick way of 
documenting what I believe I've discovered about how GUB updates the 
website, and how it is done otherwise.

GUB builds and uploads the binaries and the documentation.  The upload is 
done as a separate step from the build - it requires the builder to check 
that all has gone well before doing the upload.  The upload is about 700 
Megs in total, and on my DSL system takes around 4 hours.  The upload uses 
rsync with the delay-updates option, which I understand to mean that it 
doesn't apply the changes until all the files are uploaded.  However, it 
also has a number of separate rsync steps (e.g. the tarball is a separate 
step) so I believe the documentation is treated as an atomic set, but not 
the whole update.  I think that browsing the website once the upload has 
completed can take you the latest (recently uploaded documentation) whereas 
the website says it's still at the previous version.  This is because GUB 
uploads the binaries and documentation, but does not rebuild the website.

To make the website appear to be at the latest version, we need to update 
VERSION and news-front - and this is an important feature - in master.  If 
you're wondering why the website still says 2.16.1, it's because I'd not 
cottoned on to this.  I'd updated stable/2.16 but not master.  The website 
runs 2 cron jobs every hour.  The first pulls git master.  The second 
(essentially) runs make website - so the website we see is based solely on 
the contents of the master branch.

In summary: GUB updates the documents and the binaries; git master controls 
the contents of the website via cronjobs.

--
Phil Holmes