On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 8:35 PM, Shaun McCance <sha...@gnome.org> wrote: > Meta: How can we prevent these kinds of late-cycle changes in the > future?
Testable[0]. And OSTree, hopefully. > Part of the problem may be implementing from mockups with > insufficient specification of behavior. But there will always be > implementation issues you don't anticipate in design specs. Yes. And some ideas appear absolutely fantastic when written in a spec, but just don't work out when you sit in front of the implementation. Reevaluating design specs by testing the implementation as early as possible and refining the design based on the results is essential here in my opinion. Ideally designers should start evaluating a feature as it lands, so that code and design can evolve in parallel. Unfortunately jhbuild is not exactly a friendly tool for non-developers (in particular mid-cycle, where running a build without breakage by one dependency or another is the rare exception). And as we start to integrate more deeply with lower layers, jhbuild doesn't work at all. Around Guadec time, fully testing the code in development basically required running a bleeding edge system like Rawhide, with a couple of system packages replaced by versions built straight from git. Discussion on how to improve this took up a good part of the GnomeOS BOF at Guadec for a reason - and the resulting initiatives around automatic builds, QA and early testing hopefully will bear fruits soon. > What about a concerted effort to test implementations against the > designs immediately following the freeze? I don't think that's good enough. Coincidentally, Allan filed this particular bug the very same day of the freeze, but between some back and forth between coders and designers, getting patches written and reviewed and working on quite a list of other fixes for 3.6.1, we still ended up as late as now. We will need to do better, but there's hope we actually will. Florian [0] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Testable _______________________________________________ release-team@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/release-team Release-team lurker? Do NOT participate in discussions.