[Ns-developers] Request to commit -fvisbility=hidden pythonbindings patch

[craigdo@ee.washington.edu]

> BTW, I guess the result of yesterday's discussion regarding regression
> testing / bug 370 is that maintainers DON'T need permission to push
> changes during this phase.  We will however, transition to that mode
> of operation at some point in the future, say the last week or two of
> this month

I found there were two periods when it was extremely helpful to lock down
the dev repo and run *all* the tests before continuing.  It's not as
critical at other times ...

1) When major merges were happening -- I called this merge week.  We really
want to demonstrate that a new feature is going run on all of our supported
platforms (yes, including Cygwin and osx ppc, not just on a subset of
compilers).   We want to make sure that new bits will run properly and not
break existing code.  It's really impossible to determine this against a
moving target.  I had times in which virtually everyone was committing
changes to this or that module while we were trying to merge something new
in.  It's extremely painful at a minimum.  I believe you have had the
pleasure of experiencing this kind of thing, Raj :-)

2) During the code freeze/RC period.  We are really striving for stability
here.  It is a really, really bad sign for the system to be broken in any
way during this time.  It would be bad for RC-n to come due and to have the
release manager run the tests and discover that the system was broken the
week before by a "bug fix."  I think the release manager really needs help
from the developers to make sure this doesn't happen; and I think we should
start helping out perhaps a week before RC1 by starting to run all of these
tests when we make changes.  More testing eyes make for less catastrophic
problems, so to speak.

FWIW

-- Craig