Am 23.04.2018 um 16:00 schrieb Jim Jagielski:
It seems that, IMO, if there was not so much concern about "regressions" in
releases, this whole revisit-versioning debate would not have come up. This implies, to
me at least, that the root cause (as I've said before) appears to be one related to QA
and testing more than anything. Unless we address this, then nothing else really matters.
We have a test framework. The questions are:
1. Are we using it?
2. Are we using it sufficiently well?
3. If not, what can we do to improve that?
4. Can we supplement/replace it w/ other frameworks?
It does seem to me that each time we patch something, there should be a test
added or extended which covers that bug. We have gotten lax in that. Same for
features. And the more substantial the change (ie, the more core code it
touches, or the more it refactors something), the more we should envision what
tests can be in place which ensure nothing breaks.
In other words: nothing backported unless it also involves some changes to the
Perl test framework or some pretty convincing reasons why it's not required.
I agree with the importance of the test framework, but would also like
to mention that getting additional test feedback from the community
seems also important. That's why IMHO the RC style of releasing could be
helpful by attracting more test effort before a release.
And for the more complex modules like mod_proxy, mod_ssl and the event
MPM, some of the hickups might have been hard to detect with the test
framework. That's why I think having a more stable branch 2.4 with less
feature backports and another branch that evolves faster would give
downstreams a choice.
Regards,
Rainer
