Re: Adopt a platform today!

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 17 Feb 2011, at 18:24, David Chisnall wrote:

> Some time around the last release, there was an idea that we should document 
> the platforms that we actually care about in the next release.

> Yes, and mentioned to a few people at FOSDEM this year.

> If you care about a platform, then you should:
> 
> - Run the test suite on that platform
> - Report (or, ideally) fix failures
> - Be the contact point for bug reports that are specific to that platform
> 
> It would be nice if we could actually do this and advertise in the next 
> release:
> 
> Tier 1 platforms, where someone is running the tests and is willing to fix 
> bugs.
> Tier 2 platforms, where someone has run the test in the past and we think 
> stuff still works, but no one is actively maintaining, and
> Tier 3 platforms (everything else - may work, but you're on your own).

I was particularly interested in the third point ... having people volunteer to 
be the first contact and help deal with platform specific bug reports.

Most of the core developers only have access to a few different platforms, and 
in practice can really only do rapid debugging on a couple they use daily.  So 
this is an area where people using unusual hardware or less common software 
combinations can make a big difference.

We also need someone to coordinate this (ie maintain a website/wiki page 
listing the degree of support on each platform and listing the contact email 
addresses etc).