David Abrahams wrote:
on Sun Apr 01 2007, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld-AT-sympatico.ca> wrote:
David Abrahams wrote:
on Sun Apr 01 2007, "Mårten Rånge" <marten.range-AT-gmail.com> wrote: Whether boost is 'monolithic' or a 'library collection' seems to me a rather academic question, at least as far as boost users are concerned, as they can't download and install individual libraries.
They can only download the whole thing at once, but as for installation, if they want a subset of headers, what's wrong with bcp? If they want a subset of binaries, what's wrong with our bjam/configure options?
How many boost users are actually building boost themselves, compared to those who use prepackaged 'system' libraries ? (And from those who do build themselves, how many are sufficiently familiar with the infrastructure to know how to use these fine tools well (compared to those who are very happy to just be able to get the whole thing up and running so they don't need to touch it ever again) ?
As far as the release process is concerned, it would certainly help if the regression testing would be at least somewhat modular. Having test runs involve not only all libraries, but also all build variants and all (available) toolchains is a very significant slowdown.
Unfortunately, I don't believe all build variants _are_ tested. But anyway, I don't understand what you mean about modularity and slowdowns. The tests are distributed across many machines. If you dedicate a single testing machine to one toolchain and build variant, you can't do this much faster. Many testers do incremental testing, so only the changed stuff gets rebuilt.
You are right, the total execution time is still the same. However, a more modular system is more easily parallelizable. More testers could contribute cycles as the resource requirements wouldn't be quite as high. This, then, makes the cycles from checkin to report containing associated test results smaller, helping to get fixes in quicker. Etc. etc.
Anyway, I hope after 1.34 ships we can get to work on a system for testing much more effectively. The current one is definitely showing its age.
That would be good indeed. Regards, Stefan -- ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...