Robert Bradshaw wrote: > For someone > who has a hobby of building complex software on a wide variety of > systems (and I'm very glad people like you are out there as the Sage > project wouldn't be where it is without it) doing this is no burden at > all. I'd rather spend my time thinking about, e.g., algorithms than > build processes.
I'm not so sure it is a hobby. It is about 5 years since I switched my HP-UX box on. Solaris is my main OS, but I am well aware that testing on multiple platforms shows up bugs in the software, even when those bugs are not platform dependent. For example, how about the bug where a function declared as void tries returning a number? I think you would have to accept that is both * A bug in the code * A bug in gcc for not detecting it. This was only found after testing with the Sun compiler. The point I am trying to make is that by testing on multiple platforms on a regular basis, with multiple compilers, will show up bugs in the underlying code. My maths skills are pretty useless - enough for an electronics engineering degree, but that is it. > My attitude is that (nearly) anything that can be automated should be > automated. I get the impression that the job of release management > involves a lot of acting as a manual build bot and waiting (stuff > computers are good at) as well as conflict resolution. An automated > build bot could almost completely manage the first task, and also help > with the second (specifically, if testing were more granular, ideally > on the patch rather than alpha level, there would be less conflict to > resolve. > > - Robert I agree if it could be automated it would be a good thing. I am well aware it would be a complex task to set up though. I could easily see one could spend a month full-time on just doing that. For now at least, I'd like to see a port to Solaris which will build easily. We are almost at that stage. Dave --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
