New list for Continuous (and celebrating 17,296 trees to date)

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

We have a new dedicated list for the GNOME Continuous project:

https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-continuous-list

Background on Continuous:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeContinuous

I believe GNOME Continuous is still presently the fastest of its
scale[1] public automated continuous delivery[2] (not just CI, and not
manual packaging) of an operating system.  Let's look at the repository
statistics as of today:

$ ostree --repo=repo log gnome-continuous/buildmaster/x86_64-devel-debug
| grep commit | wc -l
17296

Each tree is a result of one or more git commits to one of the > 300 git
repositories actively tracked by Continuous, from NetworkManager,
systemd, the Linux kernel, X.org, and of course the many, many git
repositories that make up GNOME core and many applications.

$ ostree --repo=repo log gnome-continuous/buildmaster/x86_64-devel-debug
| tail -5
commit 0143dd0e484ee81637cf530611fb048012fc614c1369314fc631696377e043b5
Date:  2013-09-12 05:09:03 +0000

    Compose

That was the first commit in the current repository; then over ~377
days, that's an average of ~45 releases a day, with very little in the
way of human intervention.  Each release is booted, tested, and
screeenshots taken.

All of these builds presently occupy 153G:

$ du -shc repo/objects
153G    repo/objects

One of the reasons I believe Continuous is so successful in fulfilling
its design goal is by default it updates without human intervention, but
we have the ability to *undo* - to un-ship when things break.  This is
radically different from the traditional model of distributions which
update manually.

At any point, if there's a bad commit to one of the input git
repositories, it's very easy for a build administrator to just revert to
a previous commit, and tell the upstream author.  When it's fixed, we
can untag.

At the moment for example, both systemd and NetworkManager have been
tagged pending resolution of issues:
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-continuous/commit/?id=108653bc9f8e66bd19228f5bd8f2505b51263fe5
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-continuous/commit/?id=7f06173d7ce6085b2732a7190bf1fb7f64ff77e0

If you're interested in the system as a user or developer, please feel
free to join the new list!

[1] If you know of something that approaches the scale and speed and is
delivering an OS (e.g. kernel + userspace with update system, let me
know) 
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery