I Hate Releasing Software

I’ve written a bunch of software. I like coding, I like debugging. I like getting e-mail from people that have used my software and are happy.

I don’t like actually having to make a release.

To do a good and proper release of a program, I’d be doing approximately these tasks:

  • Upload to Debian
  • Push to my darcs repo
  • Upload a tar.gz to my server
  • Update a webpage with the latest tar.gz
  • Announce the release to freshmeat
  • Announce the release to a mailing list
  • Update/post screenshots, if things have changed

So I have two wishes. First, I want a tool that maintains a website with software listings. Each program should have its own page, with a description, links to mailing lists, download links, links to the darcs repo, screenshots, etc. It should be simple but I’m too lazy to write it.

Secondly, there should be a tool that will do all of the above tasks (except the screenshots) for me. It should infer the name of the project and the version from the data in my working directory. It should be able to automate this while process without me having to lift a finger.

Sadly, no such thing seems to exist.

And, to date, I’ve been too lazy to write one. Does anyone know of such a thing?

7 thoughts on “I Hate Releasing Software

  1. Ari says:

    If you do write a program to do that, you should release it using itself.

  2. Anonymous says:

    Could you use a script to automatize the task ?

    The hardest work will be freshmeat announce …

    1. Steve Kemp says:

      Anonymous:
      http://freshmeat.net/p/freshmeat-submit/

      A project using XML::RPC to release to Freshmeat. (I’ve never used it.)

      I have a makefile target “make release” which runs the test suite, makes an archive, and GPG signs it. Then I just scp to my host(s) and post to freshmeat manually.

  3. Josef Svenningsson says:

    As long as you stick to Haskell there is hask-home by Björn Bringert:
    http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bringert/darcs/hask-home/doc/

    It doesn’t do all the things you’re after but at least it is a start.

  4. cliff says:

    We’re fortunate, Tekamah is pretty small but our grocery store has fresh meat.

    1. John Goerzen says:

      Hehe, sounds like Tekamah has figured out something that Walmart hasn’t yet…

  5. Recently I mentioned that I hate releasing software. It’s true, and I’ve decided that the first part of fixing it is to tackle the presentation of software to the world.

    My current scheme of darcs.complete.org for repositories plus bare directories on

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