<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>BIRT Build Types</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.eclipse.org/birt/style/frame_page.css" type="text/css">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
<p class="head">BIRT Build Types</p>
<h1>BIRT Build Types</h1>

<dl class="bold-list">
<dt>Releases</dt>
<dd>Releases are builds that have been declared major releases by the development 
team - for example "R1.0". Releases are the right builds for people 
who want a stable, tested release, and don't need the latest greatest 
features and improvements. Release 
builds always have an "R" at the beginning of the name i.e. R1.0, R2.0 
etc. Non-release builds are named according to the date of the build - for example 
20041027 is the build from Oct 27, 2004.</dd>

<dt>Stable Builds</dt>
<dd>Stable builds 
are integration builds that have been found to be stable enough for most people 
to use. They are promoted from integration build to stable build by the architecture 
team after they have been used for a few days and deemed reasonably stable. The 
latest stable build is the right build for people who want to stay up to date 
with what is going on in the latest development stream, and don't mind putting 
up with a few problems in order to get the latest greatest features and bug fixes. 
The latest stable build is the one the development team likes people to be using, 
because of the valuable and timely feedback.</dd>

<dt>Integration Builds</dt> 
<dd>Periodically, component teams 
version off their work in what they believe is a stable, consistent state, and 
they update the build configuration to indicate that the next integration build 
should take this version of the component. Integration builds are built from these 
stable component versions that have been specified by each component team as the 
best version available. Integration builds may be promoted to stable builds after 
a few days of testing. Integration builds are built whenever new stable component 
versions are released into the build.</dd>

<dt>Nightly Builds</dt>
<dd>Nightly builds 
are produced over night from whatever has been released into the HEAD stream of 
the CVS repository. They are completely untested and will almost always have major 
problems. Many will not work at all. These drops are normally only useful to developers 
actually working on the BIRT project.
<br><br>
Note: Nightly builds are 
produced only as requested, and not necessarily every night, by developers to 
build what was in CVS HEAD. </dd>

<dt>Maintenance Builds</dt> 
<dd>Periodically builds for maintenance 
of the current release will be performed. They will not necessarily be stable 
builds. When the maintenace is finalized and released, it will be moved up to 
a Release build. If the build name starts with an "M" i.e. M20031110, 
then it has not been tested for stability. If it is a release candidate, i.e. 
0.5.0.1RC1, then it is a stable maintenance build.</dd>
</dl>

</body>
</html>