Re: [boost] trunk vs release

Subject: Re: [boost] trunk vs release
From: Stefan Seefeld (seefeld_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-05-21 14:49:29

Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Stefan Seefeld wrote:
>
>   
>> Vladimir Prus wrote:
>>     
>>>> I don't quite agree. Assuming I have boost version N installed on my
>>>> system (no matter by what means), I may want to test a given library
>>>> (from whatever branch) against the installed system, not necessarily a
>>>> working copy of a whole boost tree.
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> Can you explain why -- as in specific use cases? Especially given the
>>> lack of source- and binary- compatibility guarantees.
>>>   
>>>       
>> May be that's precisely what I want to test. :-)
>> Seriously, if I'm working on a boost library, I may want to test against
>> different versions of boost (requisite libs). 
>>     
>
> Why? I assume not out of mere curiosity, but because you assume some
> users will use mixed Boost, and then we're back to the question why
> they might want to do that.

Let's not get hung up on this particular use-case. Let's just assume 
people want to see (or even validate) whether a particular boost 
component (library) builds against some other (externally managed) boost 
prerequisite.

If you don't like that use-case, here is another one:
A long time ago, Rene was working on a buildbot setup for boost. I 
suggested that a plausible situation would be that contributors might 
want to help testing boost, but not the entire thing, but only one 
module at a time. They would have a known-good ('golden') build of boost 
somewhere on their system, and a full build&test-cycle would then 
consist in checking out the module, build it, test it, send back results 
to the buildmaster. Quite a reasonably small chunk of work, we thought.

The whole idea was that this was fine-grained enough such that 1) more 
people would be willing to contribute and 2) the time such a task would 
take would be reasonably small, such that the official build / test 
report would always reflect the current state (or with a very small delay).

At the time we discussed that, the test results posted were typically 
between one and two weeks behind the state of the repository.

Do you find this use-case more acceptable ?

Thanks,
       Stefan

-- 
      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...