10.19.08
“Camino 2.0a1 minibranch, bread truck factor of 2”
I’m very happy to announce that we now have a confirmed bread truck factor of 2 throughout the Camino Project. For the past year or so we’ve been working to make sure that no key project area could be wiped out by a single rogue bread truck, and while we had the website, tinderbox administration, and other assorted things covered, release builds still essentially had a bread truck factor of 1.
Since January of 2006, Mark Mentovai had been our release engineer, and while both Mike Pinkerton and Simon Fraser had been the release engineer in the past (along with Brian Ryner and, presumably, Dave Hyatt in the distant past), nearly three years is quite a bit of time (and release procedure changes). Fortunately, we hadn’t been completely at the mercy of rogue bread trucks since March of 2007, when Mark first posted the “Branch Tag Build Release” instructions on our wiki, but no one else had ever followed the instructions and built a release—until last night.
I’m happy to report that Mark’s instructions are both complete and detailed, and while some of the workings of cvs are still Linear-A to me, the instructions more than compensate. As a result, we have a release candidate build of Camino 2.0 Alpha 1 (in the usual location) that we hope to release early this week as the official 2.0 Alpha 1, and we have a confirmed bread truck factor of 2 across the Camino Project. 
(N.B. Just because we have a bread truck factor of 2 does NOT mean it’s OK for a bread truck to take out me or mento!)