Peter Dimov wrote:
Dave Abrahams wrote:
The biggest question is against which versions of Boost dependencies the commit will be tested. The obvious choices are 1. the version that was part of the last boost release, and 2. the last version of the dependency to be individually released (i.e. that dependency's "master" branch).
This is fine in some scenarios, not so fine in others. Imagine that the "develop" branch of, say, SmartPtr introduces a potentially breaking change, say, use of explicit operator bool. Until dependent libraries are tested against this change, it will not become known whether they are affected.
This is effectively the same as using all the other libraries to test the one library with the change. There are a number of reasons I don't like this idea. a) It consumes a large number of resources - a change on in one library triggers tests on all other libraries which might depend upon it. b) When a change in library A provokes a failure in library B library B's author has to go on a bug hunt to eventually conclude that the error was caused in some place where he had no place to look. c) library B's tests are really designed to check pre-requisite library A. They just assume that library A works. If they can't assume that - then the tests for library B have to be a lot more complicated. Then it's even harder to find the source of a failure. d) The real solution is to add more tests to library A. But that's hard now since our testing infrastructure is heavily loaded - in large part re-testing depending libraries. e) some libraries like boost test are used in the testing itself. These can't be "under construction" at the same time they are being used as part of the test infrastructure. I would like to re-iterate the idea that trunk and release libraries be tested against the next release (ie the current release branch). Robert Ramey PS - On personal machine, I have the release branch loaded and just switched to the trunk for the serialization library. This has made my life much easier since I've avoid the above problems. PPS - Hmmm - I wonder if this will be possible/easy under the Git system.
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