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  • From: Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] gcc 4.0.1 complaints
  • Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 18:40:43 +0200

On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 09:37:00AM -0600, David Kowis wrote:
> Okay, this may seem as a whiny baby type thing, but I'm going to
> complain anyway.
>
> http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10770
> http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10722
> http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10711
>
>
> Those are three spells that I've encountered that don't build in gcc4
> most notably of which is postgresql. I'm glad I didn't simply do a
> sorcery system-update on my fileserver before testing all this. I'd have
> ended up with a useless website as I would have no postgresql. This is a
> big problem. Surely some cast testing could've been done to ensure that
> fixes could've been written before this made it into test.

gcc 4.0 spent _ages_ in devel grimoire for exactly this purpose.
Apparently not enough people cared about it.

> I'm not sure what testing process went into making sure gcc4 was ready
> for the mainstream set of users. It needs to include casting all spells.
> I'm just somewhat peeved that gcc4 breaks several spells that I'm using
> on my systems. Amavisd-new needs arc, which doesn't build. Postgresql
> simply doesn't build.

The testing process was several developers using gcc 4.0 full time on
their machines, filing and fixing bugs as they were encountered. I tried
getting a list of all tested spells going in the beginning, but that
didn't work out, so I'm thinking about different solutions for 4.1 right
now.

> Now, some of you are thinking, "Well durr it's /test/!" But it's still a
> mainstream grimoire. Lots of people use test in production environments
> because often the versions in stable/stable-rc are old. Also, IIRC the
> policy for pulling from devel into test is, "It builds for the
> developer." IMHO gcc4 doesn't since the above spells don't.

"It builds for the developer" doesn't mean "every possible
user/dependency of this was tested", that's exactly what test grimoire
is there for. People using test grimoire in production environments have
to be aware of that fact. When it's a matter of old versions, that's
a use for scribbler, use stable or stable-rc and pull the stuff you need
more recent into a local grimoire with scribbler.

And I hope you realize that building every spell with gcc 4.0 would
_not_ have been a sufficient test. The real test would have been 'build
every spell with all combination of options and all combinations of
options in its depednencies', as quite often there have been failures
just in combination with specific optional_depends. This gets you to a
combinatorical explosion that leaves you testing for the next couple of
universes ;)

That being said, I agree that it would be useful to have a better
coverage of testing for stuff like gcc. Doing a manual list obviously
doesn't work as people won't update it. So what would be useful is some
automatic way to extract info like 'those 50 spells were built with gcc
4.1.x and cast successfully' from the compile, install and activity
logs. That way it would be a matter of running that script every now and
then on your development machine and send the info to the grimoire lead
to be aggregated into a full list.

--
Arwed v. Merkatz Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
http://www.sourcemage.org




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