Snapshot Releases of VStar in GitHub

Affiliation
Astronomical Society of South Australia (ASSAU)
Sat, 05/06/2023 - 10:24

Resulting from work on this issue:

  https://github.com/AAVSO/VStar/issues/340

"snapshot releases" are now available here:

  https://github.com/AAVSO/VStar/releases/tag/snapshot

A snapshot release will be created when work towards a GitHub issue has been reviewed and merged back to the master branch of the VStar GitHub git repository:

  https://github.com/AAVSO/VStar

The text you'll see on the snapshot release page is as follows:

This is the latest snapshot release created from the master branch.

Anything released from this branch should be considered stable in principle since changes come from pull requests and all unit tests will have run and passed before code is merged to master.

This gives early access to new features, bug fixes, and plugins. It's also considered a best practice in software development. A side benefit is that it reduces the pressure on generally busy volunteers to make frequent formal releases of VStar. :) Nevertheless, formal releases are still important due to additional system testing, release notes, and documentation updates.

Archives for Windows (vstar-win.zip) and any operating system with a bash shell (vstar-bash.zip), e.g. Linux & MacOS, are automatically added to the daily release, along with the latest plug-ins archive. The Windows installer and MacOS X DMG archive are not currently created in a snapshot release automatically.

You may see that the snapshot release badge on https://github.com/AAVSO/VStar currently indicates a failing status. This is a temporary artefact.

See also https://www.aavso.org/vstar-development-releases