Ben Artin wrote:
Can someone explain exactly why this wasn't caught in unit tests? I am not sure I understand why we missed this, but I am pretty sure it's important that we try to avoid this happening in the future.
The Dirxion tests: http://engineering.meta-comm.com/boost-regression/CVS-HEAD/developer/smart_p... are being run with inlining turned off. The bug only manifests itself when inlining is on.
Sure, bugs happen. My main point here is that we should make sure we learn something from them -- or, more importantly, that we should learn something from them *before* our users learn that Mac OS X releases of boost are not thoroughly tested.
The lesson here is that we can't test everything and that we must make a beta or an RC available earlier. We've had similar configuration-specific bugs before, and they weren't caused by platform-specific implementations. Alpha testing simply can't obviate the need for beta tests.