Re: Address output-distance problems: (issue 563730043 by address@hidden)

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 6:17 PM David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Kevin Barry <address@hidden> writes:
>
> >>
> >>
> >> Frankly, I am more sympathetic to "worksforme" discussions among
> >> developers than telling users "worksforme".  Where is the point in being
> >> able to tell users that no developer will reproduce their problem?
> >>
> >> I'd rather have an error popping up for at least some developers than
> >> for none.
> >>
> >
> > This sounds like you are saying it's better for the situation to be a mess
> > for developers so that they can better help users deal with the same mess,
> > therefore we should leave things as they are.
>
> I say that having a developer monoculture doesn't buy as anything since
> we still need to provide for a multitude of users.

Much to the contrary. With Docker, one can test on a multitude of
platforms. For example, with

  https://github.com/hanwen/lilypond-ci

I can easily test patches from Rietveld, Github and my local machine
against Ubuntu Xenial, Fedora and Fedore with Guile 2.

This didn't catch the problem with dash vs bash, but I can adapt one
of the images to install dash rather than bash as the shell.

I also haven't done separate build directories, but will do so shortly.

This means that individual developers can test changes that are risky
(version upgrades, build system changes) more widely, and can push
them with more assurance.

I encourage you to try it out, and give  some feedback.

--
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen