Until this point, we have been pushing new binaries straight through into a Holonix release as soon as they built. While this is great for some people, who need to be working against the bleeding edge, it really hurts others looking for stability.
Until this point, we haven’t really had anything that we could call “stable,” but as we move into “final exam” preparations, and increasingly high stakes events (hello Holo World world!), it makes sense to give downstream consumers more room to breathe.
We are focusing on shipping right now, so we’ve kept the solution pretty low-fi until now.
There is a new branch called love that we manually push commits to from master and then the https://holochain.love domain picks this up.
The branches have unconventional names and there are no formal processes around this manual push yet. Expect this to firm up and mature after HoloPort shipments.
The simple story is that we need tests to pass on Holonix and that there be some kind of announcement and documentation review before pushing to the love branch. We are calling this process “blessing.”
There are many reasons why tests might pass upstream and fail in Holonix (e.g., when automatically generated zomes become stale) so it’s best to plan based on your use case rather than what we’re doing.
- If you’re involved in alpha testing Holochain and Holoscape internals directly then track/pin against the Holonix master branch or directly build binaries yourself as appropriate
- If you’re working on zomes on a day-to-day basis then pin against some commit in the love branch for binaires and use published crates on crates.io for library dependencies
- If you’re planning a hackathon or using Holochain casually then just use https://holochain.love and the automatic scaffolding tools
This new process will allow power users and developers who need to track the bleeding edge to pin against new builds coming in if they need it (instructions here). It also will allow for more stability/quality assurance in what holochain.love tracks, which is great for hackathons and other events where the Holo-curious can mess around and try things out.
Instructions on how to do all this are documented on the Holonix docs site.
Please comment on the Holochain Forum and let us know how things are coming along.
