Re: [RFC] Our release cycles are getting longer

[Marcin Dalecki <martin at dalecki dot de>]

Wiadomość napisana w dniu 2007-01-24, o godz02:30, przez David Carlton:

> For 4, you should probably spend some time figuring out why bugs are
> being introduced into the code in the first place.  Is test coverage
> not good enough?

It's "too good" to be usable. The time required for a full test suite
run can be measured by days not hours. The main reason is plain and
simple the use of an inadequate build infrastructure and not the pure
size of code compiled for coverage. Those things get completely  
ridiculous
for cross build targets.

> If so, why - do people not write enough tests, is it
> hard to write good enough tests, something else?  Is the review
> process inadequate?  If so, why: are rules insufficiently stringent,
> are reviewers sloppy, are there not enough reviewers, are patches too
> hard to review?
>
> My guess is that most or all of those are factors, but some are more
> important than others.

No. The problems are entierly technical in nature. It's not a pure human
resources management issue.

> My favorite tactic to decrease the number of
> bugs is to set up a unit test framework for your code base (so you can
> test changes to individual functions without having to run the whole
> compiler), and to strongly encourage patches to be accompanied by unit
> tests.

That's basically a pipe dream with the autoxxxx based build system.  
It's even
not trivial to identify dead code... A trivial by nature change like the
top level build of libgcc took actually years to come by.