groff
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [Groff] [patch] unbreak make install


From: Ingo Schwarze
Subject: Re: [Groff] [patch] unbreak make install
Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2014 16:53:50 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

Hi Werner,

Werner LEMBERG wrote on Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 09:01:46AM +0200:

> What we are discussing right now is not bug handling per se,
> but checking the current integrity of the git groff repository,
> ensuring that it simply compiles and install.

Actually, to be honest, i am more worried about potential subtle
issues being introduced into the groff code base than about outright
build system crashes.

Lately, we are seing a considerable number of large commits shuffling
stuff around that are inherently hard to review.  At the same time,
we are seing that a large fraction of commits contains blatant
issues, so they were apparently insufficiently tested before commit.
Some of these issues are fixed shortly afterwards (anybody remember
the commit exchanging the arguments of Perl push()?).  But what
about those that aren't?  Or what makes you think that no subtle
issues are being introduced, at a rate of the same order of magnitude
as the obvious, blatant issues we are all seeing?

That frequent build system breakage is just annoying (in particular
when i'm the first one to run into it ;-) but it is 100% sure all
build system breakage will be found before people actually run the
software in production, because, well, because the build breaks.
What we should really worry about is the integrity of groff code
at places where malfunction is less obvious.

> Ingo has automated this process with his packaging script, and he
> is already sending patches.

What i'm automating is mostly the application of OpenBSD-specific
patches.

I'm doing the following by hand:

 * From a git checkout:
    - make distclean
    - ./configure
    - export AUTOMAKE_VERSION=1.14
    - export AUTOCONF_VERSION=2.69
    - make dist
    - cp groff*tgz somewhere else
 * From the port directory:
    - make clean='all dist'
    - rm distinfo
    - make fetch
    - make makesum
    - make package  # which effectively just runs the steps patch,
                    # configure, build, fake install, package
    - sudo pkg_add -r the_new_package

Not much automation is needed to do basic QA.

Of course, i'm not at all opposed to unit testing.
It can be a very valuable supplement to manual testing.

However, no kind of unit testing or even automated integration
testing can replace careful development practices and careful
manual testing.

You see, the Zope project once released a fully automatically
tested stable production release where everything worked
perfectly - except that, well, if you tried to start the
server program *outside* the testing framework, like you
would in production, it crashed instantly, every time.

Yours,
  Ingo



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]