Re: [boost] Re: [1.32 Plan] Stalled forever?

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-08-28 13:25:42

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 19:30:41 -0500, Aleksey Gurtovoy wrote
> >> 2) At least please take care of the unmarked failures in 
> >> Boost.Test before
> >>    claiming that you've done your part for the release.
> >
> > Does it say anywhere that I am required to? All the failures either
> > expected or too minor to jump to fixes now and disturb the
> > release. I had enough unexpected headache with things I did decide
> > to fix
> 
> You don't have to *fix* them if you consider them minor. But nobody,
> including the library users and the release manager, will know 
> whether they are minor or not until you *mark them up* as such, preferably
> with a short note explaining the cause and the consequences.

I have to say, that the transition over the last month in the regression
testing system has made this alot of work to keep on top of.  There has been
quite alot of churn in the toolset names -- adding of new compilers vc8,
tru64, etc. Just when you think you have everything marked a new one pops up
or an old one changes.  I'm not saying the new system is bad -- on the
contrary I think it has enabled us to run more tests and see failures more
clearly than ever before.  It's my 'guess' that alot of the failures that are
there now have always been there, but we just haven't seen them because we
weren't running the tests or it was too hard to find...

> > Please, understand that I am not trying to find responsible. But I
> > also don't find this uncertainty acceptable.
> 
> If you want to reduce uncertainty, please consider contributing to
> bringing the main trunk to a releasable state.

So clearly the mainline isn't quite ready for release, but I get a sense that
it is alot closer than you are implying -- as long as you aren't looking for
an all green board.  The one thing that I'm not able to see in the new system
is regressions from 1.31 -- before we decide the mainline is shippable I think
we really need to assess it compared to the last release.  Not sure how to do
that now.

Also, in my view there's probably a small core set of 'almost compliant'
compilers that we should be driving toward 100% passing (or at least green):
VC7.1, gcc3.3, Intel 8, cw9.2.  As I recall (see below) VC7.1 was at 100% on
1.31 and I think there's some set of compilers that are good enough that users
should expect boost will work with them.  After we've achieve that goal we can
worry about problems in the other compilers...

And BTW, what happened to the 1.31 regression test reports on the webpage? 
It's useful to have them around from time to time ;-)

Jeff