Hess, Philip J wrote:
Thank you for your replies on this matter. No one addressed the underlying problem here. I believe that all the examples should be run prior to a major release and those that do not run should be removed. This should be a significant part of regression testing. This was clearly not done on the Intel Mac version and from your replies has never been done for this version.
I agree completely. With a volunteer project, it likely comes down to a 
question of manpower. Who exactly should test every example on all platforms 
before each release? That's pretty tedious work. However, I would submit that 
whoever wrote or contributed the example should do the testing. Vincent does 
give those of us who have published packages (see CCR page) plenty of warning 
before a new release to _test_ our stuff against it and file bug reports if 
anything is broken. Anything that's considered a regression usually holds up 
the release until it's fixed. The same should hold for the examples shipped 
with Laz.

Also take into acount, that most of the people who contribute, including many of the core developers, have limited budget for hardware and software licenses. After all people do this in their spare time for no salary at all.

I for example have only one PC for testing. 32 bit intel architecture. And a Windows license (one).
I can test things under:
- Vista (32 bit)
- Various linux versions (32 bit) in a Virtual machine
I can not test under:
- Mac (unless someone buys me a mac)
- any 64 bit architecture (unless someone buys me the hardware)

Similar will apply for other people. If Lazarus would only include code by people who can afford all testing environment, there would be very little code available.

The people who build the distros for the platform, already spend a lot of time on this. Asking them to do *all* test by them self, would put off a lot off people and there would be no distros being build at all.

Testing code is a contribution, same as good and as important as writing code. People willing to contributors their time on testing are always welcome.

As stated by Philip, the release process has plenty of time for tests. Many are done by the lazarus team, but more need to be done by contributors.

Best Regards
Martin


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