Bjoern Michaelsen píše v St 14. 03. 2012 v 18:38 +0100: > While being open to further concrete proposals for improvement, I dont think > there is a fundamental flaw with the release concept itself. The quality of > 3.5.0 and and 3.5.1 show that the number of regressions in 3.4 were a one-time > outlier. We have to make sure it does not happen again, but I see no general > flaw with our release model. > > We need to be sure to detect and pinpoint regressions earlier and more precise > than in 3.4 -- and we have that with unittests, subsequenttests, onegit and > bibisect -- all means that we were still missing in the 3.4 series. > > Those were the parts that needed changing and they are changed already. It > doesnt end there though: With gerrit and the currently ongoing efforts in QA > in > addition to the tools named above, we are getting even better early warning > and > enable ourselves to quickly and confidently fix regressions.
I agreed with everything that was said by Bjoern. I just want to add that we need to be realistic: 1. Every software contains bugs and regressions. See "Every non trivial program has at least one bug" at http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-computer.html 2. IMHO, nobody is able to fix all regressions because any fix potentially creates another regression. 3. Some regressions are not easy to fix because the new code is completely different. We always need to consider the seriousness of the regressions and the cost of the fix. 4. IMHO, we could not maintain too old code by volunteers. It is frustrating and very expensive. The code is evolving. People forget the old structures and functions, so they need to investigate a lot of stuff when they did into the history. Also the testing is expensive unless you do trivial changes and you are sure that it does not break anything. In the real word, it is done only by a company if a customers pays for it. 5. We need 3.4.6 because 3.5 is too young and we still might miss some regressions and nasty bugs. We review the fixes when backporting, so 3.4.6 should not need extensive testing. Some basic tests should be enough. You said that 3.4.6 would have been more or less useless for many users because of the regressions. I do not think so. LO-3.4 is being used by many users, so it is usable. Some users are conservative and do not want to risk 3.5 too early. 3.4.6 brings some very useful fixes for these people. We might change our mind and provide 3.4.7 if people report too many serious bugs in 3.5 and it takes longer time to make it usable. On the other hand, it seems that 3.5 is going to be better that 3.4. I do not see any reason to spend more time on this historic 3.4 code line right now. As described by Bjoern, we do a lot to improve the code, tools, and processes. LO-3.5 seems to be better than 3.4, so we seems to go the right direction. Best Regards, Petr _______________________________________________ List Name: Libreoffice-qa mailing list Mail address: [email protected] Change settings: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice-qa Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice-qa/
