Cleanup our release process.

[jimmyhchan]

What we are doing today:

• write a lot of code
• possibly update the version in package.json
• possibly run make dust maybe...
• commit
• at some point, tag in git and npm publish

Proposal -- separate everyday commits and release commits:

• add a build directory that is .gitignored and .npmignored
• change make dust write to this build directory
• change make test so that it makes dust and uses the built dust to run tests
• change make clean to empty out the buid directory
• change make release so that it makes dust, tests and copies the results into dist

everyday commits will improve:

• pull requests will not include dist/* changes
• pull requests will not change the package.json
• tests will be against the built code which includes the compiler and parsers which was directly referenced before.

release process will improve:

• releasing will also run a build and tests
• releases will have a release commit so it's pretty obvious when we bump the version

[rragan]

+1

[andrewwakeling]

+1.

It would be great if:

• there were only the latest versions of the core and full libraries in "dist"
• the minified versions of the libraries were always part of the release too ("make" isn't very Windows friendly)

[jimmyhchan]

@andrewwakeling can you elaborate on the issue with minified versions in the release. I assume you are referring to the github release zipfiles/tarballs. They appears to have the entire dist folder which has every version with uncompressed and minified.

[andrewwakeling]

@jimmyhchan Yes. I'm referring to the github release zipfiles/tarballs. I assuming that people who want to get dustjs will always download these (as they are the ones linked on http://linkedin.github.io/dustjs/).
Not every version that exists in "dist" has an equivalent minified version (e.g. I can see dust-full-2.2.0.js but there is no dust-full-2.2.0.min.js).
I don't think it's great to store previous versions in this manner, but my biggest issue is that there isn't always a minified version for the latest version.
It's made slightly worse because the current process of producing a minified version of the library is to use "make", which isn't so great for Windows developers.

Edit: I just confirmed that there's no 2.2.0 minified JS files when using "npm install dustjs-linkedin" as well.

[jimmyhchan]

Confirmed as well. That's definitely bad.

Adding to the list of TODOs

• add a command to make release that creates a zip and a tarball
• checkout each tagged version and remake all the releases
• upload them to http://linkedin.github.io/dustjs/ as "previous releases"

[jimmyhchan]

Pulled & closing