On Wednesday 27 May 2009, Eric Kow wrote: > Well, as usual, my job is to let managers get on with it and do their > jobs, so if there isn't a consensus on this (and one seems to be forming > anyway), what Petr says goes.
I agree with Petr on this. Keeping the code under the shelf for the next 7 months, will only get it tested by less than 5-7 people. Now testing would be a too strong word to describe the activity, since there will be no dedicated people doing testing all day long trying to discover bugs. The process is more like random findings of bugs caused by specific usage patterns of people who develop darcs and stay synced with the head version and at the same time use it for day to day work. I do not expect anyone outside this mailing list to actually compile and test darcs taken from the unstable branch. One needs to be both a darcs and haskell enthusiast to do that. Unlike other projects where it is enough for one to be a fan of the project and just do the ./configure; make; make install dance, here having the need to have a haskell environment installed and correctly setup is a serious barrier for people who like darcs and are willing to test the latest developments, but have no haskell knowledge and nor the time to fiddle with installing a haskell environment which they use for nothing else. Given that none is actually doing systematic testing, but bugs are more likely to be discovered randomly when they are triggered by a specific usage pattern of some user, your best chance to get some better coverage is to get as many people involved as possible, which is only realistic if the code is included in a release. Probably releasing micro versions more often after a x.y.0 release, will alleviate the pain caused by bugs that can slip into a x.y.0 release (bugs will slip in there no matter what you do and how conservative you are in accepting patches). They should only contain bug fixes and no new features. Having a lot of users trying it out and reporting problems is more effective even that 24/7 dedicated testers, if you indeed have a lot of users exposed to the software. IMO the only way you can do that given the context and the barriers mentioned earlier, is through a release. -- Dan _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
