Re: We Want Quality

On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, rasmus@lerdorf.on.ca wrote: > I don't think shutting down CVS for 5 days is an option. There are too > many components at too many different stages of development to make this > work without annoying the hell out of the developers. Perhaps, "shutting down CVS" was a bit strongly worded. I think it would also be fine if the maintainers of non-essential extensions kept working on them (whlie it still would not reflect well on PHP if it was released with broken domxml or other extension). But, during RC cycle we should limit commits only to serious bug fixes and then start another RC after a few of them. > I do think that mainline changes (stuff that is critical for PHP to run at > all) just before a release need some serious review and should probably > cause the release date to be pushed back until the new RC candidate has > been out there for a couple of days. Agreed. > The real issue here is that the release candidates are not tested on > enough platforms and enough different environments. I would much rather > start a process by which we never release something until the release > candidate has passed a checklist. Something like: > > Apache/Linux/Mysql y y y > Apache/Linux/pgsql y y y > Apache/Linux/Oracle y y y > Apache/FreeBSD/MySQL y y y > Apache/FreeBSD/pgsql y y y > IIS-CGI/Win32/MSSQL y y y > IIS-CGI/Win32/Oracle y y y > IIS-ISAPI/Win32/MSSQL y y y > IIS-ISAPI/Win32/Oracle y y y > > I realize it may not be feasible to get 3 people for each of the Windows > configurations at this point, but if we went through a checklist like this > on a release candidate and we get 3 people that check off each of these > environments I think it would at least eliminate the really silly > mistakes. Any code changes would require the RC to be rebuilt and for > this checklist to be cleared. The release should then be generated from > the RC CVS tag so the release is exactly like the RC that passed. This would be good too. And we could do it for more modules than you listed if we got more volunteers. We could even have a chart of which modules are currently stable and which are not (sort of like Tinderbox in mozilla.org). Regression test suite is sorely missed too. -Andrei Complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind. -- Steven Pinker