Re: We Want Quality

On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Zeev Suraski wrote: > > I'd once again disagree. I don't know if you've ever gone through a > > commercial alpha/beta program, but I have - in fact, I'm going through > > one right now for a big company. The rule is that after a certain date, > > no features get added and no new stuff gets committed, except for fixing > > major crash bugs and such, and even then, some of them are put off until > > the next incremental release. Granted, our codebase is much smaller, so > > we like to think that we know it pretty well and by implementing a minor > > feature or a bug fix, we will not destabilize the tree. However, as you > > pointed out, it did happen a few times already, and it will happen > > again. I see nothing wrong with being a little more professional and > > disciplined as far as our release process is concerned. > > Don't twist my words please; It happened twice out of a couple of dozen > releases, one was a fairly major showstopper, the other was not. Overall, > I'd say that it's working pretty well, and it doesn't fall below > commercial standards. There you go with "don't twist my words" again. Ok, perhaps my sentence could be read as if you said that the screw-ups will happen again, but the fact is that no matter who says it, it will happen anyway. You forget that min()/max() was broken in 4.0.0 release (my fault) so add that to your list too. Something like that should not have happened, but it did, because we keep committing things that are not clear cut bug fixes during RC cycle. > I also don't think our codebase is small, and is in the commercial > neighbourhood easily. Not every project is Windows 2000 with 30 million > lines of code. With all the included libraries and generated .c files, we have about 220,000 lines of code. Not miniscule, but not large either. > I disagree. Cooperation from the developers with the current release > scheme would do the trick. Our main issue is developers who don't fix > their bugs (see the bugs database), and not last minute changes. You > can't blame them either, we're on a free-will based project, after all. > The amount of damage made by last minute changes in the last 3 years was > negligable, even though we should try to reduce it even more, but not by > draconian rules. No one is blaming the developers for not fixing bugs, that's a separate issue anyway. Seriously, you think asking people not to commit any code (except for clear cut bug fixes) during RC cycle is too much to ask? -Andrei * If things appear to be going well, you have overlooked something. *