Re: [boost] The Release Manager's Point of View

From: Rene Rivera (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-04 15:42:45

Thomas Witt wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Douglas Gregor wrote:
>> On Jun 4, 2007, at 10:10 AM, Beman Dawes wrote:
> 
> I was going to write this email, but Doug beat me to it.

And I guess you both beat me to it... As I was busy spending all my free 
time trying to fix bugs for 1.34.1. Although what's below are not my 
only thoughts on the release procedure...

> The proposal seems to assume infinite resources in testing.

AFAICT the it also mandates increasing the testing and release 
management tools pipeline. And this is something we just don't have the 
resources to implement at this time. And likely wont have them in the 
next 6 months. In this respect I find the proposal contradictory. It 
both says that the tool chain needs to be simplified, at the cost of 
features, and calls for more tools.

>> I agree with most of Beman's write-up, but it pre-supposes a robust  
>> testing system for Boost that just doesn't exist.

It also pre-supposes a "stable" starting point for ongoing releases. 
First 1.34.1, will not be such a release. Second, it will take at least 
6 months to make a clean and stable release, and that's without adding 
new libraries. Third, IMO to make a clean, stable, robust 1.35 following 
the proposal would take more than a year.

> Agreed. Lets build the foundations first.

Yes. And some of us have been working hard toward that. I've made the 
changes to the regression scripts to publish test results to 
<http://beta.boost.org:8081/>. And Noel is hard at work making it 
possible to publish to that server directly from bjam+boost.build, and 
hence making it possible to shorten the testing tool chain.

> We will not ship 1.35.0 within the next year if we do 
> major surgery to our directory structure. It's just not going to happen.

There are two other aspect to 1.35.0 that I'm trying to address. In 
another thread, I raised the question of svn dir structure. And it 
devolved into the same aspects that this thread devolved to, discussing 
how to split the sources up as much as  possible based on libraries. 
This is fine, but it doesn't get us any closer to managing the structure 
we currently have. We need to concentrate on making this simpler first! 
Which brings up the second item, the website. One of the simplifications 
for releases is to separate the website content from the release itself. 
(that was my rant)

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