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Re: Release Quality Control
Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
>
> 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.
I try to keep up with this list and it is very difficult. There is a
lot of
volume and a few days of any real life distraction are deadly.
> > 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.
I don't know if gcc-announce is the appropriate place to make these
announcements
but if it isn't, then a dedicated list for "please test announcements"
might
be useful. Limit posts to the RMs.
> > 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).
I certainly like this part but the volume of email to keep up with is
pretty high just to make sure I test at the right times. It is really
easy to miss one.
> Gerald
> --
> Gerald "Jerry" pfeifer at dbai dot tuwien dot ac dot at http://www.pfeifer.com/gerald/
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