Re: A Suggestion for Release Testing

[Gerald Pfeifer <gerald at pfeifer dot com>]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, Scott Robert Ladd wrote:
> Given the recent problems with the 4.0.0 release and major packages like
> KDE and the kernel, has anyone considered testing releases by completely
> compiling a Linux system?

Are you sure nobody is doing this?  Or to phrase it differently: have
you checked Bugzilla and the ChangeLogs as to what kind of reports and
patches SUSE and Red Hat have contributed to GCC 4.0 in recent months
and weeks? :-)

Note, though, that this is only one part of the equation.  A most 
significant amount of work also goes into analysing and potentially
fixing packages which do not compile any longer and submit fixes
upstream.  And once that has has been done, one has to address the
usual set of miscompilations, which, if they appear somewhere deep
in KDE or lilo, are a lot of fun to track down, so you'll also want
to perform full functional and stress testing of the resulting distro.

And all that for at least x86, x86-64, ppc, s390/s390x and ia64. ;-)

> The downside is that the compile would take quite a while; even for my
> dual Opteron, full builds take more than a day. On the other hand, this
> might catch some problems before release.
> 
> I'm willing to implement this, if it's deemed useful.

This is certainly an excellent idea.  The more testing we can get,
the better.

Gerald