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

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-06-06 22:48:07

Rene Rivera wrote:
> 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.

That isn't the idea. Rather the current lengthly pipeline is gradually 
retired in favor of shorter independent pipelines.

> 
>>> 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.

By definition, the last release is always considered stable. Stable 
doesn't mean perfect, it just means good enough to build upon.
> 
>> 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.

That will be a nice help!

>> 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.

I agree. OTOH, I'd like to do minor surgery on a small number of 
libraries, particularly moving the headers into the library's 
<root>/libs tree (and presumably replacing any headers in the the 
<root>/boost tree with forwarding headers).
> 
> 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)

Could you explain that thought a bit? By "website content" do you mean 
portions of the website that are no tied to a particular library?

Thanks,

--Beman