For a long time bottling was just done by me on my local VMs. It's pretty simple really; `brew install --build-bottle wget && brew bottle --root-url youweb.com wget`, upload the outputted bottles somewhere and add the `bottle do` block into the formula file.
You can go a step further with this by using the `brew test-bot.rb` script (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Hom...) that we use for our CI. With that it's `brew test-bot --ci-testing wget && brew test-bot --ci-upload wget` which will write to the formula file, commit and push it.
Obviously there's a lot there that's hardcoded to our use-case but if you can create a feature request issue I'd be happy to work on better docs and more flexibility around this.
The use case I'm interested in would be running the test-bot automatically in a Jenkins/buildbot/whatever environment, where you point the bot at a repo of Formulae and it dumps bottles to a storage provider like S3. Once the dependency caching issue is resolved, I'm interested in getting this to a point of anyone being able to relatively trivially deploy it.
The other use case would be commercial entities wanting to distribute closed-source libraries or other software via bottle-only. So they'd want to run something as CI that would watch the private repo for a tag, and once tags are created, would automatically bottle those releases and push them out.
I'm not sure what the dependency caching issue has to do with bottling?
The latter use-case I don't have any particular interest in writing code for myself but I'd consider merging PRs for. The prior is possible with brew-test-bot if you do the uploading yourself (although I may be adding S3 support in the coming months). Using Jenkins should make all of this pretty trivial as-is.
The dependency caching is orthogonal to bottling; it's just that there's little incentive for me or anyone else to set up or document the bottling process (for ROS on OS X) until the created bottles are usable, which is not presently the case.
The bottles are usable? Homebrew and some other third parties already use bottles. If they aren't working for you: please create an issue so we can fix them. Thanks!
There's no point in the ROS community bottling ROS packages for Mac-based robotics work until it's possible to install them without a long dependency-resolution step. That's the usability issue.
You can go a step further with this by using the `brew test-bot.rb` script (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Hom...) that we use for our CI. With that it's `brew test-bot --ci-testing wget && brew test-bot --ci-upload wget` which will write to the formula file, commit and push it.
Obviously there's a lot there that's hardcoded to our use-case but if you can create a feature request issue I'd be happy to work on better docs and more flexibility around this.
Hope that's useful!