Re: Do we still want develop branch?

From: John Maddock (jz.maddock_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-11-06 09:24:07

> The CI for the boost serialization does not and never has worked.  
> This is easy to veryify just by looking at any of the CI output for 
> this library.  And this demonstrable fact has been pointed out 
> numerous times. This situation is never addressed.
>
> I doubt that the serialization library is the only one with this issue.
>
> The sadist part of all this is that even if it did "work" it would 
> still be useless.  It's not uncommon for a large and/or complex 
> library to fail one or more tests on one or more compilers due to 
> issues in the compiler itself.  These can't be "fixed" in the 
> library.  The test matrix shows all the tests x all the environments.  
> One can easily see if any failure is general or isolated to a 
> particular environment.  The current CI just registers pass/fail for 
> the whole library and all the environments.  Some times someone will 
> suggest skipping a particular test for a particular library so the CI 
> comes of clean.  This is basically hiding the error.  Users 
> considering using a library in their own enviroment are basically 
> mislead that their the library works everywhere - which is 
> demonstrably untrue.  It's a fraud.

Personally I find that CI works just fine, with one caveat: you do need 
to update the scripts on a semi-regular basis otherwise you will find 
lots of useless failures often caused by changes to the host environment 
outside our control.  This of course reflects real world usage.

A typical example - clang on ubuntu jammy just stopped working - the 
cause was an update of the system default compiler from gcc-12 to gcc-13 
which rendered the clang version we were testing non-functional.  The 
solution is to do what you would tell a user to do - update the clang 
version to one that can handle gcc-13's std lib!

>
> The output of the CI is very user unfriendly.

It's not awful, it's just a dump of the build output - just like you get 
if you run tests locally.  It could of course be better.

I just do what I would do for console output and search for "..failed" 
to find the failures.

Oh and you can download the logs and process them yourself if you want to.

>
> The current CI is very slow and consumes a ridiculous amount of 
> resources.

Actually I'm astonished how fast it runs, if you haven't updated your 
scripts in a while though, it's likely you're using github images which 
have been deprecated, and will basically never run now (or take a very 
long time to do so).

Resources, I would agree on.

Best, John.