[M3devel] M3 concerns

[Olaf Wagner]

Quoting myself:

> Discussions seem to loose their focus quiet easy on this list :-/

It might seem that I've scared everybody away from further discussing,
or indeed nobody else is interested in this topic. As I'd promised
to write a resume, here are some comments / suggestions:

> How do we need to improve
> the CM3 development process to ensure and increase the overall quality
> of the CM3 code base? Could everybody interested in this discussion
> please just comment on the following items to state his opinion:
>
>  o I think we have agreed on the fact that automatic regression testing
>    would help and should be introduced. Tests should be run daily/nightly
>    on as many platforms as possible, and results should be collected
>    and made available via WWW (elego offers to host these services, as
>    it does for CVS repositories and CM3 web access).
>
>    Technical details should be discussed in a different thread.

There has been some progress on CM3 regression test automation.
The tinderbox setup by Kaspar is working and quite usable, though
some things still need to be improved or fixed. Have a look at

   http://tinderbox.elegosoft.com/tinderbox/cm3/status.html

to view the current build results (from FreeBSD and Linux systems; two
test runs every day for every platform). We're now at the stage that
others could contribute their daily build results, so that the
platform coverage gets better. Some details (mostly security related)
still have to be resolved (with out administrators); I'll follow up
on this in a separate mail.

I've also invested a considerable amount of time to review all the
failures and problems in the m3-sys/m3tests regression test package,
which is now run as part of the daily tests. The short result is
that there still _are_ several problems with the current compiler
and/or runtime which may need attention. I'll post another summary
for this; volunteers for closer inspection are welcome.

>  o Do we need / want to restrict the commit access for the CM3
>    code repositories?
>
>    If so, only for certain areas, or for everything? This would
>    be a distinction based on packages.
>
>    Should we allow or prefer committing new code to branches and
>    merge the resulting change sets based on reviews? (I could also
>    contribute automatic support for creating change sets on branches,
>    as this is part of the DCVS functionality elego developed some time
>    ago). This would be a distinction based on code lines.
>
>    Yesterday I had the impression that some members of this list
>    would prefer some access restriction, but I'm not really sure.

As there have been no more comments / opninions I'd suggest that
we leave things as they currently are, unless there are good
objections to this.

>  o I'm not sure if and how we should include the Windows target
>    problems here. They were part of the original mail, but seem
>    to belong to another category to me, at least have different
>    causes. Suggestions what exactly to discuss are welcome.

I don't know if Randy was successful in getting the current CM3
system to run on Windows; some problems and solutions have been
posted to m3devel since last week. There also seems to be progress
in resurrecting the NT386GNU target, but this is obviously work in
progress.

So far for this (intermediate?) summary of CM3 QA :-)

Please let me know what you think about the recent additions and
changes,

Olaf

PS: I won't be able to continue to spare as much time on CM3 as I've
     done during the last three weeks, so I'd like to encourage everybody
     who'd like to help, improve or take responsibility for (some of)
     the started tasks.
-- 
Olaf Wagner -- elego Software Solutions GmbH
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