I know epic has been looking into better ways of distributing binaries. I usually follow/checkout the latest and greatest every few days. I know what it means being on the bleeding edge and I understand completely that builds won’t compile but given on average the latest source won’t compile ~2-3 days later (on average) because of binary change. I know its not a big priority.
I (and probably the community) would like better distribution, or if we cant get that a consistent release cycle.
It would be nice to have (either or) :
Binaries posted on a predictable schedule (every friday for example). It seems very unpredictable (1-2 weeks give or take) at best right now.
It’s tricky, because we usually wait to release the binaries until there’s been a build promoted by our QA department. Those are builds that we give to our artists and designers after some basic sanity checks; making sure it compiles on every platform and doesn’t crash on startup, corrupt data, and so on. We’ve had a spate of runs recently that have prevented us from promoting builds, and it’s been a topic of much discussion as to how to fix it here.
I’m going to put the third party source in the repo instead of the zips, which might improve the situation a little. That way you could at least recompile the odd third party library if you’re brave enough check out master and find something missing. I’d like to have it be easy to build all ThirdParty stuff locally.
Those zips also currently include a bunch of other stuff that’s perhaps less important to building (like samples, templates, precompiled binaries, etc…). I’d like split those things off, and have the required dependencies be all you need to build - and updated on a more regular cadence. I’ll see what I can do.
That make sense to only push latest binary/preview when internally, you give them to artist/designers/qa team to work with. That may actually be the best coarse of action for 95% of subscribers
But Thanks for the recent change (I saw it merged in yesterday). I could see this greatly helping fix most of the build breaks because of some of the binaries. Off the top of my head i see two of which who caused recent problems: ICU, and OneSky for example. Although now, I may be the most hated person now causing even longer compile times (if they have to compile the third party stuff), :X sorry guys!
It doesn’t compile source for ThirdParty libraries automatically, you still have to build them manually I’m afraid. There’s no unified way to build them all at the moment, but we’ll work on improving that. At least it might help when we’re not able to get updated zips out to you quick enough.
