Weldon Washburn wrote:
Folks, I have spent the last two months committing patches to the VM. While we have added a ton of much needed functionality, the stability of the system has been ignored. By chance, I looked at thread synchronization design problems this week. Its very apparent that we lack the regression testing to really find threading bugs, test the fixes and test against regression. No doubt there are similar problems in other VM subsystems. "build test" is necessary but not sufficient for where we need to go. In a sense, committing code with only "build test" to prevent regression is the equivalent to flying in the fog without instrumentation. So that we can get engineers focused on stability, I am thinking of coding the JIRAs that involve new features as "later" or even "won't fix". Please feel free to comment.
Please don't w/o discussion on each. I see no reason to do that right now, as while I 100% agree that stabilization is a necessary goal, we're not anywhere near the point where we need to call a halt to adding new stuff that's missing.
We also need to restart the old email threads on regression tests. For example, we need some sort of automated test script that runs Eclipse and tomcat, etc. in a deterministic fashion so that we can compare test results. It does not have to be perfect for starts, just repeatable and easy to use. Feel free to beat me to starting these threads :)
Feel free to add a script to the build-test framework :) geir
