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Re: Release Quality Control
On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Joe Buck wrote:
> When the RM puts out a prerelease tarball, this should be interpreted as a
> request that the keepers of the secondary platforms do tests, ASAP.
Point is, we do _not_ have a sensible way of allowing people to follow
GCC (and be it just for doing this kind of test) without having to keep
up with the high volume mailing lists.
This is fine for those of us who work on GCC for a living or who spend
much (if not most) of their spare time working on GCC, but it is becoming
increasingly hard to be a tester for a secondary platform or just track
GCC decently.
> If we go through three prerelease tarballs and it isn't noticed that,
> say, Solaris X86 doesn't bootstrap, well, it wasn't a primary platform
> and no one who cared about it bothered to do tests, so sorry. The
> lesson to be learned is that people who do care will have an incentive
> to get involved next time.
...but have no way of getting the relevant information ("Oops, I should
test now") easily.
> If you run a minority platform and no user of that platform does this,
> it is likely that 3.2.3 won't work on your platform, and it will not be
> Gaby's or Mark's fault.
Sure. Though still we should try to make the entry level of contributing
and testing not too high.
Both are serious problems these days, not the least due to the sheer
amount of develoment going on (which is, mostly, a good thing per se).
Gerald
--
Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at http://www.pfeifer.com/gerald/