Hello Mike, * Mike Frysinger wrote on Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 10:40:50PM CET: > On Tuesday 24 November 2009 13:52:40 Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > > > > Please link to such real-world examples right away, it cost me two > > emails now and 15 minutes wasted on this bug report, with > > absolutely no knowledge gained; without the PHP hint, I could still > > not be sure whether we are talking about the same code, and would be > > completely off two months in the future. I've dowloaded > > http://www.php.net/get/php-5.3.1.tar.bz2/from/a/mirror now. > > i dont come to autotool lists with random pieces of code i pulled out of my > ass. i'm acting as the middle man between upstream autotool packages and > distros/downstream packages. you guys release new versions but you dont test > them with nearly the same coverage we get nor deal with the breakage that > seems to come with every new version. i'm sorry to have wasted '15 minutes', > but we distros have multiple people spending hours on this shit.
My previous mail certainly had an inappropriate tone to it; sorry about that. Like Eric I would suggest however to not spend hours on breakage but report it here, with less reduction work but more info on how to allow us to reproduce it. That can hopefully also allow us to add better test cases from real-world examples to the testsuite, in turn hopefully making us not add the same regressions in the future. Realistically, we cannot try out building hundreds of packages before a release; we don't have the manpower for that sort of feat. We can and do try out a few. With better information on what packages are typical problem childs, we might have a better test set. Another idea is that if some distribution has the means in place to rebuild large parts of their Autoconf-using sources with a newer test release with little manual work involved, and there is build farm resource available, we could try to go that way (or ask someone to do that for us). Thanks, Ralf
