Release Quality Control (was: DOC PATCH: GCC 3.2.3 release schedule)

[Joe Buck]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2003 at 04:01:00PM +0200, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
> Like many people here, I would like to see quality improvement
> increase at least proportionally (by a large factor) as releases go.
> Your suggestion of waiting for positive confirmations on primary and
> secondary plateforms is certainly a good one.  I would like to hear
> other people's opinions. 

The distinction between primary and secondary platforms that the SC
agreed apon is this: for a primary platform, any critical issues will hold up
a release (at least until we decide to ship anyway), but for a secondary
platform, all we say is that we have a dedicated volunteer who will
run the tests and do the best he/she can to draw attention to problems
and try to get them fixed (or recruit others to fix them).  We've been
a bit sloppy about this in the past, but what this should mean for you
as RM is to pay attention to the primary platforms; the secondary
platforms are Not Your Problem (though you can leave a window of
time for people to get fixes for those platforms into the release).

To be precise, this is my recollection of what we agreed to, it may
not be precise.

I would suggest waiting for a successful build and test from the tarball
on each primary platform.  For secondaries, if there's a bootstrap
failure and someone produces a clearly safe patch that fixes it, by
all means include it if it arrives early enough.