On Sep 4, 2008, at 4:54 AM, David Roundy wrote: > It's effectively impossible to support a platform that no one uses, > and very hard to support a platform that no developers use. > >> Perhaps it is time to develop a clear policy on this issue and >> stick to >> it. As Zooko has suggested, we could even use the buildbots to >> reflect >> that policy, i.e. whatever we platforms we say we support being >> whatever >> platforms we have slaves for. > > As I've mentioned to Zooko before, I want darcs to work on (just > about) any system that people want to use it on, and don't intend to > limit support to users who are willing to run buildbots. On the > other hand, I do believe we've got buildbots for ghc 6.4.
I think we may be "in violent agreement" on this issue. As you say, it is very hard to support a platform that no developers use. If there is such a platform, it would be useful to communicate to potential users and to developers about the fact that it is going to be hard for darcs to support that platform. On the other hand if developers do use a given platform, then we can arrange for that platform to have a buildbot, too. (Human hacker time is very much more precious and expensive than buildbot time. If there is a hacker who is willing to maintain darcs on a certain platform, then we can get a buildbot for that platform.) The thing about a platform which doesn't have a buildbot is that we don't know if the changes we are making to the darcs source code are breaking darcs on that platform. The way I interpret Eric Kow's comment about "policy" is simply that developers and users can all be made aware of this unfortunate fact. It doesn't mean that we will refuse to apply patches which fix bugs on non-buildbotted platforms, but it does reflect the unfortunate fact that we can't guarantee that the darcs trunk is always working correctly on those platforms. Regards, Zooko P.S. I know that the current buildbot setup is imperfect -- it is sending false alarms, mostly about buildslaves disconnecting and reconnecting, and there are test failures of various kinds, and there are unnecessary red rectangles on the waterfall [1] when maybench isn't installed. I am trying to fix these problems when I have time to do so. Eric Kow (with a little help from me and from many buildbot contributors) has fixed a lot of problems already. Buildbot can be made to work without problems such as these -- I've seen it and used it quite a bit on other projects. So please generously interpret my arguments in favor of relying on buildbot as arguments in favor of relying on a well-oiled buildbot, such as we are getting close to having. --- http://allmydata.org -- Tahoe, the Least-Authority Filesystem http://allmydata.com -- back up all your files for $5/month _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
