On 07/12/2012 07:43 PM, jimmy wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:57, David Henningsson <address@hidden> wrote:
Something I've been thinking of for a while, and the recent
thread
reminded me of that thought...
FluidSynth is quite a versatile program/library, and we all
want
different things out of it. No one of us has the full
picture, or uses
FluidSynth to all the different things it can be used for.
Making sure that none of all these use cases break, is one
of
FluidSynth's biggest challenges, and maybe sometimes it can
cause us to
be overly cautious.
Same thing can be said for most softwares out there. I agree about
being cautious, too. I definitely don't want malware backdoors in
any softwares, or buggy softwares either.
Although, being an open source community, it's the code contribution
that make the software grow.
Agreed.
Imagine Linus writing all the changes alone, by himself, for the
Linux kernel in it's current form? That would be insane. I doubt
that Linus even fully understand much of what's in the hundreds of
device drivers in the kernel, nor the hardware to test those
himself. Can't even test all those changes even if he has all the
hardwares working in his lab(s), let alone having an "RC" (release
candidate) available every weekend for people to test.
I guess the difference here is dedicated time for development; there
are hundreds or even thousands of people getting paid for working on
the Linux every day, here we are only volunteers.
Linus has its subsystem maintainers which he trusts, but getting that
trust would take years of good patch writing (I think).
Here's a proposal that might help us with that challenge.
. . .
What do you think? It obviously won't be much of a tester
program
without a bunch of testers, so is this anything you think
would make so
much sense, that you would be willing to run a test or two
yourself?
A 2-3 week testing period of some "release candidate" would help
before a new release anyway.
People's hardware and software configurations can and will change as
machine break down, and replaced, as well as new releases of
libraries, compilers... It would be good to have a skeletal
test-report to fill out, and posted, so folks would have an idea of
hardware/software, which distribution, 32/64-bit OS... Not sure if
we need the library and compiler version number, but it shouldn't
hurt if those are reported back.
I guess this should be a bit adaptable depending on the test - for
testing that it builds under a certain OS, compiler version might be
more important than, say, testing envelope rendering or something like
that.
Some people might be on vacation, busy, out-sick... But as folks in
the FS-dev mailing list subscribers, let's way every "release
candidate" announcement should encourage everyone here to do a test
and report back. Can't force anyone, but just say we hope folks here
will help track down any potential bugs anyway.
Of course, any bug(s) found, confirmed, and fixed should result in a
new "release candidate" to be tested again, reset the testing time
period.
After a few rounds, we would have an idea of how many test-reports
and what environments each "release candidate" got tested, along with
how many problems found...
Not quite as formal as some automated test-suite, but would help
along the way.
Yeah, I'm thinking somewhat along the same lines. Hopefully we won't
have to make too many release candidates...
// David
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