On 1:59 PM, Chris Jefferson wrote:
On 29 October 2010 15:28, Jim Bell <Jim@jc-bell.com> wrote:
To round out the discussion...
What risks or downsides would there be to recruiting a little legion of bug-fix volunteers and turning them loose on the tickets and/or regression matrix?
Often fixing bugs on major compilers can break them on less ones, and sometimes these aren't noticed (I for example run testers for clang, which are sometimes broken). I don't know the best way of doing this, but ideally bug fixes by volunteers would want to have a "no compiler is more broken than it was before" requirement. This would obviously slow down how quickly bug fixes could be applied, because there would need to be a cycle of the testers to see which new problems have been introduced.
Good point, particularly for fixing regression tests. When attempting a regression fix, it's initial state across all platforms needs to be noted and compared to its final state.