Dave Abrahams, Doug Gregor, Thomas Witt, and I had a discussion last week at the C++ committee meeting about how to improve Boost regression testing, and the whole process of getting ready for releases. Much of what we talked about has already been discussed on this list, so our conclusions shouldn't be much of a surprise: * Making Boost regression testing as robust, automatic, distributed, and timely as possible is the best way to help developers, release managers, testers, and eventually, users. * BuildBot (http://buildbot.sourceforge.net/) looks like best way to achieve those goals, based on experiments to date. * It would be very helpful if a team coalesces around Rene Rivera to develop BuildBot regression testing for Boost. They will need to stay coordinated with the MetaCommunications folks, of course. The rationale behind the "robust, automatic, and distributed" goals is that many people are willing to volunteer machine resources for Boost regression testing, but they say that other than downloading (and perhaps answering a very few startup wizard questions) they don't have any of their own time available. Thus the vision is of something like the SETI@home project which lets people contribute spare machine cycles without burdening them further. The rationale behind the "timely" goal is that developers will benefit tremendously from faster feedback, both for HEAD and active branches. Automating the feedback will free developers from having to track what is happening on many different platforms. The rationale behind encouraging a team to work on BuildBot regression testing is that this is important to Boost, so it will benefit from a team forming. That should improve and speed development, and ensure that several people understand the system and can maintain the internals. Rene is the logical leader since he has already stepped into that role for BuildBot. --Beman