[phobos] phobos commit, revision 2028

[David Simcha]

  On 9/19/2010 5:32 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> All great initiatives. But the point is to verify that stuff builds 
> _before_, not _after_, the commit. Until we have Unix, Windows, and 
> OSX machines that we can all ssh into, that won't be possible.
>
> As unpleasant as that is to some of us, I think we need to impose 
> anyone who commits to use some Unix as their development platform. 
> (There are many reasons. One is, it wouldn't be reasonable to develop 
> on Windows or OSX as one needs to pay to get them.) Linux has wine, 
> which is stable enough to be a good test bed for Windows code. That 
> means any of us can build and unittest for at least two operating 
> systems.
>
> Just a reminder: with the current posix.mak running on Linux, to 
> unittest, type:
>
> make unittest
>
> and to unittest under wine, type:
>
> make OS=win32wine unittest
>
> If somebody wants to develop on Windows and build on cygwin, that's 
> fine too, but cygwin support is not currently in our makefile. It 
> would be a great addition.

I think this is unreasonable for a few reasons:

1.  It will encourage bit rot in the Windows stuff.  Wine is pretty 
good, but it isn't perfect.

2.  It will strongly discourage me from fixing a few low hanging fruit 
bugs whenever I have a little spare time if I constantly have to reboot, 
fire up a VM, etc. just to get started.

3.  The platform-specific parts of Phobos are a very small fraction of 
it.  Maybe it's reasonable to insist on testing on Unix when committing 
changes that are very far-reaching and likely to have a lot of ripple 
effects (like the one I broke the Linux builds on), but for run of the 
mill changes that aren't likely to have tons of ripple effects, it's 
overkill.

4.  Even if you don't get feedback before the commit, the feedback is 
reasonably rapid with Brad's system.

In short, imposing this requirement on me will substantially lessen my 
contribution to Phobos.