# from Adam Kennedy
# on Wednesday 14 January 2009 06:52:
>As soon as there's a packaged tarball living at an arbitrary URL, any
>Strawberry machine can trivially just run the following to test it.
>
>pip http://url...
>
>Pack up a dev release and get the whole repository/branch thing out of
>the picture.
>
>Throw the dev release at CPAN, and the URL at #win32 and #padre, and
>you'll get an answer for "does it work" in a few hours.
Please relay these instructions to Schwern, as his commit was the one
that done it ;-)
I already package alpha tarballs and ship them several days ahead of the
release, then manually nag people to manually test that. David's
run-throughs are particularly helpful in finding regressions, and
assuring that we're not going to be surprised by some distro suddenly
failing after the release.
But that process is already more work for me, including remembering to
check whether we're ready for a release or need to apply a patch and
try again.
And, anything that does turn-up at the pre-release stage is probably
several commits removed from the change which caused it, so the
committer is either MIA at that point or has lost significant context
compared to within several minutes or even a day of the commit. This
leaves me diagnosing the problem, running svn blame, pulling the log,
sorting intent from bug, and in the many cases writing unanswered
e-mail and thus losing my own context on the matter. This is very
frustrating and inefficient.
And the test coverage is only about 18% (if you ignore cross-platform
issues), so this sort of trouble is all too likely.
Send an error report immediately after the commit, and the committer
(who may know exactly what went wrong without looking) will probably
still be available to fix it.
If something makes even more work for me, it doesn't solve any of *my*
problems unless it pays the bills. I want Module::Build to thrive, but
I personally do not gain anything remotely worth the amount of effort
and frustration that the QA process currently requires. If someone
with more at stake wants to automate the QA or sign my support
contract, that would balance the equation.
Thanks,
Eric
--
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
--Albert Einstein
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