Re: [Boost-users] what happens between "fixed in development" and "available in release"?

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] what happens between "fixed in development" and "available in release"?
From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-03-19 11:41:21

Oswin Krause wrote
> Hi,
> 
> Question is in the subject. What has to happen after a fix of a bug in 
> development stage before it enters an official release?

What has to happen is that I have to merge the serialization develop branch
to the master branch.  My procedure is:
a) switch my local copy of the serialization library to master branch.
b) merge in current develop branch
c) update my local modular boost tree - which is always kept on the master
branch
d) (re)run all serialization library tests with clang and gcc compilers for
DLL and static libraries and debug and release libraries.  These
combinations come to about 2000 tests which are presented in a giant table
which has to come out all "green"  This isn't really enough as it should
include a couple of versions of VS but I don't have that around.

In this particular instance, I had trouble with step c).  This is not
unusual as I have to confess the git submodule setup is pretty confusing and
I don't do it all that frequently.  When I finally managed to get this done,
I found that the code that I use to review the results (tools/regression)
has been removed from the master branch.  Of course this was a surprise to
me!  Apparently I'm the only one that uses this code (not a huge surprise,
I'm not sure why though).  So now I have to remember how to get this thing
built again and figure out where I'm going to keep it.

So all in all this ends up taking a lot more time than one would expect.

You might ask - why not just merge develop into master and watch the test
results?  I would answer that I've learned the hard way that taking a
"shortcut" can lead to repercussions which such up lots, lots more time. 
Even investing the effort above, the bug that provokes this email still
managed to creep in and was not detected by my tests.

Note that all the above doesn't actually include the time finding reported
bugs.  These are pretty infrequent these days - but are often a major bitch
to reproduce, find and fix. Often they are artifacts of standard library
implementations which are very time consuming to track down.

I hope that answer's your question.

Robert Ramey

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