Re: [boost] Bug-fix volunteers: risks, downsides?

Subject: Re: [boost] Bug-fix volunteers: risks, downsides?
From: Jim Bell (Jim_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-10-30 09:44:24

On 1:59 PM, Chris Jefferson wrote:
> On 29 October 2010 15:28, Jim Bell <Jim_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> To round out the discussion...
>>
>> What risks or downsides would there be to recruiting a little legion of
>> bug-fix volunteers and turning them loose on the tickets and/or
>> regression matrix?
>>
> Often fixing bugs on major compilers can break them on less ones, and
> sometimes these aren't noticed (I for example run testers for clang,
> which are sometimes broken). I don't know the best way of doing this,
> but ideally bug fixes by volunteers would want to have a "no compiler
> is more broken than it was before" requirement. This would obviously
> slow down how quickly bug fixes could be applied, because there would
> need to be a cycle of the testers to see which new problems have been
> introduced.

Good point, particularly for fixing regression tests. When attempting a
regression fix, it's initial state across all platforms needs to be
noted and compared to its final state.