Hi Arjen (off list): There are at least three motivations why I would prefer you to continue a slow but steady pace of testing right now rather than dropping it for a while.
1. Continuing the testing effort you started before the 5.13.0 release should be more efficient than dropping testing right now and starting it up again later. For example, slow but steady testing will encourage you to make your package installs and test launch procedures so automated, that you can start installation of a new platform snapshot and/or start a comprehensive test in just a few minutes, and in each case completely forget about it until it is finished. So the goal should be that a pace of ~two tests per week or one platform installation snapshot + a test per week should literally require just a few minutes of your attention. 2. If the past is any guide, the ~3500 downloads that should occur for this 5-month release cycle will occur throughout the cycle rather than in a burst at the start of it. So if you complete the rest of the testing for Cygwin and MSVC in, say, the next 4 weeks (which should be entirely possible even at the above slow pace), then most of the 5.13.0 users who pay attention to the release notes and its reference to the wiki summary of tests should still be inspired by your test results. But if you wait to complete your Cygwin and MSVC tests until late in this release cycle, then most 5.13.0 users won't even see your test efforts. 3. It would be good to establish testing benchmarks early in this release cycle for Cygwin and MSVC (as has already been done for MinGW-w64/MSYS2 and Linux) that should be the basis of a comparison with test results late in the release cycle to see whether the PLplot changes have caused a regression in the test results. On 2017-08-28 08:35-0000 Arjen Markus wrote:
There are several other things besides PLplot that require my attention, I am afraid ;).
I am sympathetic concerning all these current calls on your time. But for the above reasons it would be better to complete your Cygwin and MSVC testing sooner rather than later in this release cycle, and indeed finishing up your current testing effort should allow you to take a complete break from PLplot testing until late in this release cycle. So ideally there should not be long gaps in your testing efforts right now. Therefore, given the other calls on your time is a steady but slow pace of testing (say ~two runs of the comprehensive test script each week) to finish off testing on Cygwin and MSVC possible? Or are you in the unhappy position of being so rushed off your feet, that you would prefer no distractions at all from PLplot testing at the moment? If the latter, I will try to honor that by not saying much more about testing until substantially later in this release cycle. But I hope a steady but slow testing pace is possible for you right now instead for the reasons stated above. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
