Douglas Gregor wrote:
Look at the 1.34 release series... the thing that's been holding us back most of all is that the testing and test reporting tools are broken. 1.34.1 is stalled because we have failures on one platform, but nobody can see what those failures actually are: the test reporting system removed all of the important information.
I agree with most of Beman's write-up, but it pre-supposes a robust testing system for Boost that just doesn't exist. I hypothesize that the vast majority of the problems with our release process would go away without a single change to our process, if only we had a robust testing system. We have only so much volunteer time we can spend. At this point, I think our best bet is to spend it making the regression testing infrastructure work well; then we can move on to a new process with its new tools.
I know I'm asking for the moon, but it would be really nice if developers have access to a compiler farm like the one SourceForge has but for all compilers that Boost uses. I know there are legal impediments, but such a thing, if plausible at all, would alleviate most of our testing woes. If something breaks, we can test it ourself and see the results immediately and fix it immediately instead of having to wait a day or two for a full test suite to complete. The current system is like having a compiler that takes 2 days to compile. 2c worth... but I thought I'd say it again :P Regards, -- Joel de Guzman http://www.boost-consulting.com http://spirit.sf.net