Daily build awesomeness

Today I'd like to let you know about a very cool Launchpad feature: Daily Builds.

In a nutshell: daily builds get Launchpad to work for developers and produce automatically or semi-automatically built packages of the latest code, ready for everyone to test and taste.

With daily builds you'll be able to:

  • Make your software available to early adopters and testers very easily
  • Facilitate the work of testers and thus improve your software's QA process
If that wheted your appetite, check out the documentation for more detailed info.

As I'm slightly biased towards everything that's got to do with translations, I cannot but think how cool it will be to combine the existing functionality in Launchpad to integrate translations, bzr branches and daily builds. I can imagine the following scenario and chain of events:

Day 1:
A translator translates a string in Launchpad

Day 1, a bit later:
That translated string is automatically committed to a bzr branch

Day 1, even a bit later:
A daily package is built from the bzr branch and released in a PPA

Day 1, finally:
The translator and everyone else can easily install the PPA, containing the new translation ready to test with the application

That's just an example on how this awesome functionality can be used, today. I'm sure you can find many other interesting uses for daily builds!