Repost: Release churn, branch stability and changes to binary building

[dhtnetwork]

From our Core Dev: David Meister. Original post in the Holonix area.

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Release churn, branch stability and changes to binary building

for anyone paying close attention to the release numbers coming out of the holochain-rust repo, you’ve probably noticed that lately we’ve been hitting large numbers like 0.0.x-alpha10 or higher for a single release

you may also have noticed that https://holochain.love is pointing to an older version of binaries (i think 0.0.34 )

there’s a few reasons for this:

• we have been using the same travis jobs to build our binaries since forever… they haven’t even been using nix and as of the last few weeks they started hanging during binary builds - rather than try to fix these scripts i ported as much as i could across to circle using nix-shell as the build environment
• we started publishing our crates to crates.io which is awesome, but also there’s a lot of fiddly cleanup that needed to happen around getting e.g. README and LICENSE files and versioning scripts all cleaned up and on circle ci
• the hc cli tool was refactored a few times to both reference the crates publishing changes and also to shift the scaffolding templates off to a separate github repo (so we can maintain the scaffolding without rebuilding all the binaries for every change to the template)
• the nixpkgs version was moved to a more recent commit from the 19.09 branch upstream which allows for e.g. newer nodejs and electron, and fixes a bug in clang that was causing compilation to fail on mac
• an urgent binary build was shipped to facilitate the holoscape alpha launch outside the normal release cycle/processes
• at some point some additional shared/dynamic libs were added that needed to be accommodated downstream in holonix
• new binary building tasks for sim2h_server and trycp_server were added, and in the process binary building was standardised/paramaterised

there is a new love branch in holonix that https://holochain.love now tracks (it used to track master )