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

From: Douglas Gregor (doug.gregor_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-04 18:59:51

On Jun 4, 2007, at 4:59 PM, Janek Kozicki wrote:

> Rene Rivera said:     (by the date of Mon, 04 Jun 2007 14:42:45 -0500)
>
>>> 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.
>
> looks really good, congratulations.
>
> Are you planning something like "request _this_particular_ test,  
> quick" ?

I would really rather see "someone checked something in, go re-test  
Boost and post the results"

However, re-testing Boost takes a while. Part of this is because  
Boost is big, part of it is because we don't consider the testing  
burden at all. For example, the Serialization library itself builds  
460 separate test cases, totalling about 741MB of code. I suspect  
that we could get the same coverage from 50 well-designed test cases,  
with other big improvements: compilation/testing would run about 9  
times faster, so we would be able to turn around tests faster. Disk  
space utilization would be cut into 1/9th of what it is now, reducing  
the number of problems resulting from "out of disk space" errors. As  
testing requirements decrease, it becomes easier for more testers to  
provide regression testing, so we get better results.

        - Doug