Re: 3.4 release

On Wednesday, February 5, 2003, at 05:50 AM, Andreas Raab wrote:
>
> Tim wrote:
>> Any additions that are only in the croquet image really ought
>> to have been cross ported before now in order to let a decent testing
>> period elapse.
>
> So what's the process for this? Let's assume we need another addition 
> to
> BitBlt or (more likely) to some of the primitive float operations.
> "Cross-porting" these is a no-op (since it only implies a few primitive
> methods) but how you would do "decent testing" outside of Croquet 
> eludes me
> somewhat ;-)

I may not be the best person to answer here (having limited VM 
experience), but perhaps the process for "decent testing" would merely 
mean that the additions to BitBlt (for example) should have been 
incorporated as updates into the alpha/beta image for some time, so 
that people building VMs using VMMaker would have built VMs with these 
additions by now.  This doesn't necessarily mean that the new BitBlt 
additions would really be exercised properly by these people, but at 
least the VMs would have been built, and any tragic side-effects would 
have been caught. :-)

> Doug wrote:
>> - Should we wait a few days between steps 1 and 2?  This would let
>> people test the final image a bit just to make sure there wasn't some
>> major problem, and maybe check out any final cosmetic tweaks.  Also, 
>> it
>> would give the VM maintainers a few days to get their VMs ready.  But
>> perhaps this isn't necessary... maybe we should make sure the VMs are
>> ready before we declare 3.4 final.  (Certainly they should be almost
>> ready anyway.)
>
> I'd recommend waiting a few days in order for the VM maintainers to 
> have
> "interim builds" which ought to be just tests if there are any major
> problems. Ultimately, the "final VMs" should be build from the release 
> since
> that'll make sure that people using the X.Y VM have a chance of 
> recreating
> _exactly_ the version that they're using (important if you ever have to
> debug something).

Okay, we can wait for the "interim builds" to be tested for a few days. 
  Since the image is pretty much ready to be switched to "final", I 
guess this means that the VM maintainers should provide these interim 
builds... now. :-)  Or at least ASAP.  Once they're provided (and 
mentioned on squeak-dev), we can then switch the image to final and 
then wait for the few days of final testing (just for major problems).

For future releases, it might make sense to have the interim VMs 
provided around the same time that the gamma image is provided, so that 
the testing is more "in sync".  In other words, these interim VMs could 
also be considered "gamma" as far as testing goes... we might as well 
test the gamma image & gamma VMs at the same time.

- Doug