On Oct 13, 2009, at 9:30 PM, William Stein wrote: > On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 9:14 PM, Robert Bradshaw > <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: >> I was just about to compose a long email on this thread, but you've >> essentially hit every point I wanted to make. In fact, I see no >> advantage for long release cycles at all--it's more work for the >> release manager, and it's not like users who don't want the new >> features are forced to upgrade. >> >> We have 66 (and counting) positively reviewed tickets out there right >> now, so for once it's not the reviews that are slowing us down. >> Hypothetically, all these could just be merged on top of 4.1.2 and >> 4.1.3 or 4.2 could be released right away, but things are clearly not >> that simple. Typically there are not many blockers--most of the time >> if a working patch is not available the bug/feature is simply pushed >> off to the next release. The question is what, exactly, makes >> actually >> getting releases out so difficult? Is most of the time spent getting >> things working on uncommon (presumably little-tested) systems? Are >> the >> obstructions typically due to patches that were not actually ready to >> go in (despite positive reviews) or changes in the target platforms >> (e.g. gcc version bumps)? Essentially I'm asking what makes release >> management hard before trying to figure out if there a way to better >> distribute the load? > > I think a huge amount of the problem will be that many of those 66 > positive reviewed tickets probably will: > > (1) clash with each other in some subtle ways (e.g., the first one > I looked at I just happen to know involves code that was moved to the > separated sage notebook, so would "fix" a subtle issue caused by the > patch in code that is no longer used!) > > (2) many of the patches will probably fail on 32-bit or ppc or OS X, > even though they worked fine on sage.math. > > So what will happen is that I (or your merge script) will carefully > apply each patch on sage.math, bounce all patches that fail. Then > we'll make an alpha release, and discover that many doctests break on > lots of other machines, but have *no* clue what patch caused the > problem. This seems like a very solvable problem, doesn't it?
Very solvable... - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
