Beman Dawes wrote:
The bottom line is that I know that code works *before* it gets merged into the stable branch. That's the critical point; the exact way the testing is done is important operationally, but those details don't matter as far as the big picture goes.
Ok, and what about a case we saw in 1.34.0 -- a library fails on obscure compiler, obscure version. Nobody seems interested to fix that. Are you expecting that tests on all compilers will be run before merge to stable? Or you expect testing on just gcc and msvc?
I would not expect regressions of such a drastic nature that the above would be necessary.
The point of testing before actually changing the stable branch is that regressions should become very rare.
If the set of compilers tested with before merge is gcc + msvc, then there's no advantage. Both are highly conforming in recent versions, and fixes are easy. What to do about obscure compilers is not obvious. - Volodya