Just some miscellaneous thoughts... Eric Kow <[email protected]> writes:
> Ugly sunsets > ============ > What we are talking about here is making any sort of major change which > has a risk of breaking darcs. Mostly it means getting rid of some old > code and replacing it with some external module. The approach I am > defaulting to, is a conservative Sunset Procedure, rolling things out in > stages (major darcs releases), where at each stage > > - make the new code available through conditional compilation > defaulting to the old code As the new code is not the default, does this really need to wait for a major release (or could it fit into a minor release)? > maybe I have it all backwards, in the sense that they only way we are > going to discover the flaws (test-driven-development aside) is to > expose the new code to a wide audience as early as possible. > For > example, as Petr might suggest, instead of doing things in three 6 > month stages, we should compress it to one stage [...] Is it acceptable in the one-stage method to simply say to users "if you have problems, downgrade to the previous release, and wait for us to fix it in the next release" ? People who really care about stability seem to already be several major releases behind the latest -- some people are still running darcs-1 format repos for this reason! >> Instead of keeping things around in case "something breaks", we should ask >> new >> code to come with test coverage [...] > > 3. It seems that for a heavy reliance on testing to work, we are going > to need to have much much wider test coverage. How do we break out > of this chicken and egg? Do we put everything on hold and launch a > massive darcs testing initiative? Do we compromise and spend half > our energy on testing, and the other half on doing new stuff? It > might be sensible. More tests could just mean faster progress. I agree with Petr's by-attrition approach: old code doesn't need rigorous tests, but new code (particularly sweeping changes, e.g. to use a new external library) *does* need rigorous test code. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
