Re: [boost] [git] Update submodules in boost.git

On Saturday 07 December 2013 14:45:21 Dave Abrahams wrote:

Andrey Semashev writes:

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On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Andrey Semashev

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So this basically means that each library has to have its own testing farm, and Boost serves mostly the bundling purpose. A possible solution, I guess, but not sure such approach would be beneficial for the quality of Boost. I doubt that individual developers will be able to do the same amount of testing for their library releases as they had with svn.

Actually, thinking about it some more, this doesn't look as a good approach at all. First, the develop branch for the submodules becomes unneeded by the superproject. Individual developers may use it at their discretion but it doesn't matter in the big picture.

And why is that a bad thing? The only purpose of the superproject is as a way of tracking releasable states of the whole library collection.

What about testing? To me, the collection is in a releasable state when the testing results show no blocker problems, and this is not a precondition for a given superproject state. It's the other way around - the superproject state accommodates changes from the libraries and every such snapshot is tested whether it is suitable for being released. In the rest of my last quoted message I described why the particular approach for testing could result in negative outcome - problems in the dependent code are not detected by testing until the problematic code is merged to master. It takes longer time for the fix to travel from develop to master again. Later in the discussion Peter assured me that the release managers' job would be to manually select which commits to master are problematic ones and exclude them from the Boost release. This sounds like a tedious task to me, but it would remove the delay in the Boost release at least. But still it doesn't help individual developers since their tests would be broken for longer times and integration problems not detected early.