Re: [boost] Re: 1.32 release preparation

From: Doug Gregor (dgregor_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-06-28 16:45:16

On Monday 28 June 2004 4:32 pm, Aaron W. LaFramboise wrote:
> Almost everything is the regression tests.  The idea is, that if your
> changes pass the regression test, everything that worked before should
> still work.  What might have problems would be new features that don't
> have tests, or odd bugs that noone has written tests for, etc.
>
> There is a certain amount of civic responsibility here.  The idea is
> that a submitter is responsible for his patch.  If a patch breaks
> something, even if its only by exposing a latent bug, the submitter has
> an obligation to help the maintainer of the broken area to fix it.  It's
> my opinion that this works well in practice.

GCC has an absolutely _wonderful_ automatic regression tester. If you check in 
code and something breaks, it will e-mail you (and everyone else that checked 
in code since the last working run) and tell you _precisely_ what test cases 
broke. Then it will keep e-mailing you until it gets fixed. Although it can 
get annoying when it isn't your bug (you just happened to commit when someone 
else did), it does work quite well.

Without a system such as this, it's hard to even _know_ when you've broken 
something (although the Metacomm regression test results _really_ help here).

        Doug