Re: Two weeks to feature freeze

Larry Rosenman wrote:

>
>
> --On Saturday, June 21, 2003 11:43:17 -0400 Tom Lane
> <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
>> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> writes:
>>
>>> Thomas Swan writes:
>>>
>>>> Have you considered something similar to the Mozilla tinderbox
>>>> approach
>>>> where you have a daemon checkout the cvs, compile, run regression
>>>> tests,
>>>> and report a status or be able to report a status?
>>>
>>
>>> Even if you could achieve near complete coverage of the platforms,
>>> platform versions, and auxilliary software versions and combinations
>>> that
>>> PostgreSQL runs with, in most cases, something breaks on a new
>>> version or combination of these things.
>>
>>
>> Still, whenever we're doing something that interacts at all with the OS,
>> it seems we get breakages that don't show in the original author's
>> testing, but only pop up days to months later when some beta tester
>> tries the code on platform P or using option Q. The current
>> difficulties with the IPv6 patches are a fine case in point.
>> If we could get feedback more easily about whether a proposed patch
>> compiles and passes regression on a variety of platforms, we could
>> reduce the pain involved by a great deal, simply because the problems
>> could be fixed while the code is still fresh in mind.
>>
>> I don't think there is any company involved with Postgres that is
>> willing to commit the resources to run a Mozilla-style tinderbox setup
>> singlehanded. But I wonder whether we couldn't set up something that is
>> community-based: get a few dozen people with different platforms to
>> volunteer to check the code regularly on their own machines. I'm
>> imagining a cron job that fires daily in the wee hours, pulls the latest
>> CVS tip, does "make distclean; configure; make; make check", and mails
>> the results to someplace that puts 'em up on our website.
>>
>> It's possible that we could adapt the tinderbox software to work this
>> way, but even if we had to write our own, it seems like a fairly simple
>> task. And it'd give *much* better feedback on porting problems than we
>> have now. Sure, there will always be corner cases you don't catch,
>> but the first rule of testing is the sooner you find a bug the cheaper
>> it is to fix.
>>
>> regards, tom lane
>>
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>
> I'm willing to run such a job on UnixWare 7.1.3 and OpenUnix 8, as well
> as FreeBSD 4.8
>
>
>
I'll have a machine shortly where I can run RH9 SMP tests..