Re: Two weeks to feature freeze

--On Saturday, June 21, 2003 11:43:17 -0400 Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> 
wrote:

> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
>> Thomas Swan writes:
>>> Have you considered something similar to the Mozilla tinderbox approach
>>> where you have a daemon checkout the cvs, compile, run regression tests,
>>> and report a status or be able to report a status?
>
>> Even if you could achieve near complete coverage of the platforms,
>> platform versions, and auxilliary software versions and combinations that
>> PostgreSQL runs with, in most cases, something breaks on a new
>> version or combination of these things.
>
> Still, whenever we're doing something that interacts at all with the OS,
> it seems we get breakages that don't show in the original author's
> testing, but only pop up days to months later when some beta tester
> tries the code on platform P or using option Q.  The current
> difficulties with the IPv6 patches are a fine case in point.
> If we could get feedback more easily about whether a proposed patch
> compiles and passes regression on a variety of platforms, we could
> reduce the pain involved by a great deal, simply because the problems
> could be fixed while the code is still fresh in mind.
>
> 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.
>
>             regards, tom lane
>
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I'm willing to run such a job on UnixWare 7.1.3 and OpenUnix 8, as well
as FreeBSD 4.8



-- 
Larry Rosenman                     http://www.lerctr.org/~ler
Phone: +1 972-414-9812                 E-Mail: ler@lerctr.org
US Mail: 1905 Steamboat Springs Drive, Garland, TX 75044-6749