Re: Feature freeze progress report

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Naz Gassiep wrote:
>> I believe the suggestion was to have an automated process that only ran
>> on known, sane patches.
> How do we know in advance of reviewing them that they are sane?
Same way as happens now. I would assume this mechanism would only be
applied to patches that had already been approved to contrib, or some
other measure that can be used to isolate only those patches that we
*expect* to already be working. The intention of this mechanism, in my
head, is to just help us make sure that regression issues on patches get
detected sooner.
> What is more, we often run into situations where patch a will require
> changes in patch b, so testing them individually against CVS is not
> likely to be terribly useful.
Yeap, given that this proposition is for an automated system, perhaps it
could be designed to apply combinations of patches together to look for
conflicts.
> Frankly, our problems are not primarily technological. They have to do
> mainly with scarcity of available time from competent reviewers. No
> amount of automation will fix that.
I fully understand that. However I find the idea of an automated process
checking for big issues while we're all sleeping to be... sexy. I'm not
sure how difficult a system like this would be to set up but it doesn't
seem to me to be the sort of thing that requires more than a few simple
scripts. If it's not too had to set up, even if it only yields small and
rare benefits, it will have been a worthwhile exercise.

My 2c (adjusted for inflation).

Regards,
- Naz