Re: [boost] [1.35.0] Release criteria compilers

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-10-05 04:31:23

Beman Dawes:

> In doing a postmortem of the past couple of releases with Thomas Witt,
> he made a very strong case that testing is a major bottleneck. If
> developers and release managers have to wait several days to find out if
> a fix works, it slows progress to a crawl.
>
> One of the things we can do to eliminate that bottleneck is to cut the
> number of release criteria compilers down to a more manageable number,
> and to compilers where testing is very reliably and runs several times a
> day.
>
> My candidates for the release criteria compilers are:
>
> * Microsoft VC++ 8.0 on Win32
> * Intel 10.0 on Win32
> * GCC on Linux
> * GCC on Darwin

If these compilers provide reliable testing, running several times a day, 
they will deliver their results regardless of whether they are the only ones 
in the list.

Trimming the list will not increase their reliability, it will just decrease 
the reliability of the compilers that are left off the list.

In short, I believe that this is a step backwards. It does enable us to get 
a release out that doesn't work on an important compiler that is not on the 
list. Is this a feature?