Distributions going smart & bugfixes?

[Anders F Björklund]

Gustavo Niemeyer:

>> Can we find a way in between? A branch were critical bugfixes are
>> allowed to be made on stable code (e.g. non trunk)? This service
>> is/was invaluable to us simple distribution supporters. Otherwise we
>> would need to wade through all the known bugs to see whether there is
>> already a patch attached or not.
>
> Of course I can't prevent people from fixing their problems on their
> own branches, and publishing that for other users.  Actually, that's
> the beauty of open source.  The only comment I made is that this
> branch is *not* what will become Smart version 1.X.Y.  The next
> version of Smart will come out of trunk, and will contain changes
> reviewed and unittested.

I removed the links from the milestones to the branches, in order
to not confuse anyone. So now there are only bug lists in them...

https://launchpad.net/smart/trunk/+milestones

> I want to speed up the integration of changes, but we need unittest
> for pretty much anything touched (with rare exceptions).  Smart is
> used in several different environments, and it's hard today to ensure
> that new changes do not break the other environments in which the
> developer isn't considering when he performs such changes.   Good
> unittesting is one way to reduce this issue in the future.

Smart should still work OK in more conservative environments, most
of the showstopper bugs were found in the latest Fedora or openSUSE.

But some changes were added downstream, without any unit tests at all...

> Anders has been doing an amazing job on these branches and on pushing
> these fixes forward, and I want to fully support him on integrating
> these changes on trunk, even if I have to write the tests myself (as I
> have been doing with the little time I'm able to dedicate).  I'm
> hoping to work with Anders so that he can produce more changes which
> are properly unittested and ready to go, so that I can get out of the
> way and become less of a bottleneck.

Unit tests have been added to all the new additions, as requested...

Except for things that are notoriously hard to unit test with code,
like graphic user interface or docbook user documentation and so on.

--anders