[Koha-devel] Development workflow

[Jerry Van Baren]

On 1/27/2011 12:43 PM, Nicole Engard wrote:
> Nicole would like to chip in here on lots of points.  Paul brings me
> up as an example of someone who signs off on the easy to test features
> and Ian brings up training/teaching people how to test/sign off.  I
> think these two things are very important to note.  I would sign off
> on more complex patches if I wasn't terrified of screwing up my one
> and only Koha installation/database. I know I can backup and restore
> and all that jazz, but I've never done it and to that end it's scary.
> I've screwed up my git repo a few times just trying to test the 'easy'
> patches! :)
>
> I would love to be properly trained in doing this so I can test
> further.  I am on the road a lot and do most of my sign offs while
> alone in hotel rooms - that's the perfect quiet time to test!!!  So if
> someone wants to do a tutorial video or write up detailed instructions
> I could do more (and I'm sure others like me could too).
>
> Thanks
> Nicole

What would be Really Useful would be a virtual machine (e.g. Amazon EC2 
or VMware) with a test environment to "lower the bar" for technical 
skills and computer resource availability.  That could enable a larger 
pool of people who could test branches.

As others pointed out, the worst case is some legacy large patch 
branches... having a EC2 test instance might break the logjam on them 
but should not be necessary for smaller patches.

Amazon has very good starter terms:
   <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Free Tier*

As part of AWS’s Free Usage Tier, new AWS customers can get started with 
Amazon EC2 for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive the 
following EC2 services each month for one year:

     * 750 hours of EC2 running Linux/Unix Micro instance usage
     * 750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing plus 15 GB data processing
     * 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) plus 1 million IOs, 1 
GB snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put 
Requests
     * 15 GB of bandwidth in and 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated 
across all AWS services
---------------------------------------------------------------------

Best regards,
gvb