[boost] Regression testing and BuildBot discussions

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-04-21 14:35:39

Dave Abrahams, Doug Gregor, Thomas Witt, and I had a discussion last week 
at the C++ committee meeting about how to improve Boost regression testing, 
and the whole process of getting ready for releases. Much of what we talked 
about has already been discussed on this list, so our conclusions shouldn't 
be much of a surprise:

* Making Boost regression testing as robust, automatic, distributed, and 
timely as possible is the best way to help developers, release managers, 
testers, and eventually, users.

* BuildBot (http://buildbot.sourceforge.net/) looks like best way to 
achieve those goals, based on experiments to date.

* It would be very helpful if a team coalesces around Rene Rivera to 
develop BuildBot regression testing for Boost. They will need to stay 
coordinated with the MetaCommunications folks, of course.

The rationale behind the "robust, automatic, and distributed" goals is that 
many people are willing to volunteer machine resources for Boost regression 
testing, but they say that other than downloading (and perhaps answering a 
very few startup wizard questions) they don't have any of their own time 
available. Thus the vision is of something like the SETI_at_home project which 
lets people contribute spare machine cycles without burdening them further.

The rationale behind the "timely" goal is that developers will benefit 
tremendously from faster feedback, both for HEAD and active branches. 
Automating the feedback will free developers from having to track what is 
happening on many different platforms.

The rationale behind encouraging a team to work on BuildBot regression 
testing is that this is important to Boost, so it will benefit from a team 
forming. That should improve and speed development, and ensure that several 
people understand the system and can maintain the internals. Rene is the 
logical leader since he has already stepped into that role for BuildBot.

--Beman