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

[Gustavo Carneiro]

2009/3/3 Ruben Merz <ruben at net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de>

>
> craigdo at ee.washington.edu wrote:
> >> 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 :-)
>
> I don't have lots of experience with this kind of issues, so maybe there
> is something I'm missing... Why don't you use a separate branch when
> this kind of merge happens? I.e. having a merge branch where you
> selectively apply and test each new feature separately?


That is a great idea if:

1) the branch is common for all developers to-be-merged patches
2) nightly regression tests also test that branch


>
>
> Best,
> Ruben
>
> > 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
> >
> >
>
>
>


-- 
Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro
INESC Porto, Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit
"The universe is always one step beyond logic." -- Frank Herbert