Re: [boost] Review quality [ was stack trace review]

On 02/01/2017 13:58, Hans Dembinski wrote:

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On 02 Jan 2017, at 14:48, Niall Douglas wrote:

For many years now I have been a champion of an additional boost-testing distribution in addition to the main distribution. To join boost-testing one simply sends a pull request adding your github repo to the superrepo. A hook script verifies the new repo compiles and passes all its unit tests against the most recently released boost distro. If after that your github repo sees no updates to its master branch in a month, it gets auto expunged from the boost-testing superrepo by a script.

That sounds pretty cool, because it automatises a lot of the mundane things.

I'm very keen on automation, but I am also aware of the false quality issues it can generate. For example my boost-lite based libraries have a cronjob script run at midnight GMT which looks at the commits done that day on the develop branch. For each new commit, it does a RESTful query of the CDash for the project, asking if that commit SHA passed all its update/configure/build/test/packaging CTest stages. If it did, it merges that SHA from develop into master branch, and pushes master back to the github repo. That way master branch always refers to a SHA where everything passed on all CI tested platforms (i.e. Travis and Appveyor). Now that sounds cool and everything, but in fact the quality of the master branch for proposed Boost.Outcome was quite subpar. For at least a month if anybody tried using Boost.Outcome master branch they would have found it broken because the subrepo for the docs had an invalid SHA. If they then tried downloading the tarball generated by the cronjob script for every "all passing" SHA, they would have found it entirely missing because the auto old releases purge script had deleted the script doing the tarballing. Human based release management when done well is always higher quality than automated release management. To date Boost has done releases by hand. Also, automation requires a human janitor, and to date it's been easier to find reliable release managing humans than to find reliable automation janitors willing to work for zero money. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/