Re: Two weeks to feature freeze

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: "Peter Eisentraut" <peter_e@gmx.net>
Cc: "Thomas Swan" <tswan@idigx.com>; <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 21, 2003 11:43 AM
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Two weeks to feature freeze


> I don't think there is any company involved with Postgres that is
> willing to commit the resources to run a Mozilla-style tinderbox setup
> singlehanded.  But I wonder whether we couldn't set up something that is
> community-based: get a few dozen people with different platforms to
> volunteer to check the code regularly on their own machines.  I'm
> imagining a cron job that fires daily in the wee hours, pulls the latest
> CVS tip, does "make distclean; configure; make; make check", and mails
> the results to someplace that puts 'em up on our website.
>
> It's possible that we could adapt the tinderbox software to work this
> way, but even if we had to write our own, it seems like a fairly simple
> task.  And it'd give *much* better feedback on porting problems than we
> have now.  Sure, there will always be corner cases you don't catch,
> but the first rule of testing is the sooner you find a bug the cheaper
> it is to fix.
>

Two thoughts:
1. we'd need a matrix of hardware / (OS/version) / other environmental
things to ensure some sort of good coverage.
2. we'd need to test various configuration sets too, e.g. --with-krb5

I too have an old spare x86 machine lying around that I can set up with
whatever free *nix might not have coverage and contribute to the effort.

andrew