Re: GOP2: 2 - Stable releases and roadmap (radical change)

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 05:48:48PM +0200, Janek Warchoł wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Graham Percival
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > To avoid slowing down programming to a crawl, I figure that we’ll
> > identify some subset of these regtests and have a separate make
> > regtests-quick command which only evaluates that subset.
> >
> > As a rule of thumb, I’d say that the regtests-quick target should
> > take as long as a make from scratch.
> 
> *very* good idea!  +20

Well, there's no reason why this needs to be tied to a specific
release policy.  There's certainly no harm in implementing the
basic infrastructure of "make regtests-quick", leaving any debate
about exacty which files qualify for the "quick" test.

Problem is, somebody needs to sit down and do it.  Do you feel
like adding that?

> We could actually adopt a policy of aiming to have a stable
> release each 3 months, which should help with that.

I definitely think we should have stable releases much faster,
although I'd target 3-4 rather than simply every 3 months.  But
that won't happen until/unless the regression tests have much
better coverage.

This problem breaks down to:
- 10-20 hours of build system work.  (to add the regtests-quick
  target)
- 10-100 (?) hours of programmers to investigate+discuss code
  paths (?)
- 10-100 (?) hours of helpful users organizing and writing .ly
  files to cover all (? or most?) functionality
- possibly 10-20 hours of python programming to extend Patchy
  and/or the Paris university server
- somebody to organize the entire effort

I'm sadly not volunteering for any of those tasks.  I'm happy to
organize policy discussions about what to do with the results of
those tests (specifically for the 2.18 or 3.0 or other releases),
but I think we need some real effort on the fundamental
infrastructure before it makes sense to have policy discussions on
this.

- Graham