6-weeks release cycle

[weaselcat via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 10:00:17 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
> On 5/06/2015 8:28 p.m., Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Friday, 5 June 2015 at 06:42:06 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
>>> And shouldn't the CI be doing regression testing already?
>>
>> The autotester runs the unit tests that are in druntime, 
>> Phobos, and
>> dmd. It catches a lot of stuff and generally prevents us from 
>> merging
>> bad code. But it can't possibly catch everything. It catches 
>> the stuff
>> that we thought to specifically test for and bugs that were 
>> fixed (since
>> unit tests are usually added for bug fixes). But it's not that
>> infrequent for something _new_ to break that's never broken 
>> before and
>> is subtle enough that it doesn't get past all of the tests - 
>> especially
>> when you're dealing with changes to the compiler.
>>
>> To catch all of that stuff before it goes out the door in a 
>> release, we
>> need to test a _much_ larger code base than just the standard 
>> stuff -
>> which is part of why we have betas. We want folks to try out 
>> their
>> projects with the betas so that we can catch the stuff that we 
>> missed
>> before it gets released in an official release. Simply 
>> grabbing an
>> arbitrary commit and declaring it a release just because it's 
>> at about
>> the time that we want to do a release would be a disaster. Too 
>> much gets
>> through as it is simply because not enough folks test the 
>> betas and
>> report what they find. _All_ of that would get through if we 
>> just picked
>> a random commit and declared it to be a release.
>>
>> _Maybe_ someday our test suites will catch such a large 
>> portion of the
>> regressions that we won't actually end up with any regressions 
>> getting
>> out, but I doubt it. Even large, heavily used projects like 
>> gcc or KDE
>> end up with regressions getting out, much as they try to avoid 
>> it. But
>> like them, we need to do our best to have releases which have 
>> been
>> tested well enough via betas and whatnot rather than just 
>> releasing
>> stuff simply because it's a certain date.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> I wonder if we could integrate a bit more with travis and have 
> a big list of projects compiling + testing against HEAD.
> Would be an excellent indicator.
>
> Maybe even have this as part of dub repo?

I remember there being talk about testing HEAD against vibe.d, I 
can't remember what happened(if anything.)