On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 07:15:18AM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote: > On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 09:38:58AM +0300, Gabor Szabo wrote: > > http://rakudo.org/ tells me the latest Rakudo * was more than 2 months ago. > > (version 2013.02) > > > > Besides, it would be nice to see plain Rakudo release announcements > > reach that site. > > Even if only a few lines. > > Because of some personal issues, I've been really slow in being able > to work on the Star releases since March. > > I've created a candidate release for 2013.04, but we also have a problem > in that some of the modules we've included with Star no longer pass > their tests properly. Since part of the point of Rakudo Star is to > provide some stability across releases, I feel we need a way to clean > those errors up before publishing a Star release. In other words, > I don't want to push a release where we know that some of its core > modules are broken. > > So yes, the Star release process needs some attention; unfortunately > for at least a little while longer I'm distracted by other things > which is slowing my ability to personally work on it. We've made > invitations for others to do so (and the release process is > reasonably well documented), but so far nothing's happened there.
I think it would be fair to argue that from your description of things, the *release* process isn't the real problem here, so whilst documenting it better is great, it's not going to reduce the headaches, because release time isn't when one should be discovering that tests have started failing. What seems to be needed is a process (preferably automated) to build the key modules more frequently, and identify failures and regressions earlier. (This exists both formally and informally for the Perl 5 core - there are about 12 developer releases between each major stable release, and Andreas König (and maybe others) also build CPAN modules frequently at intermediate versions of Perl 5 checked out from git. We've also got smoke testers running on various platforms people care about, which spots portability bugs and regressions well before release (headache) time.) This sounds like the sort of thing that new volunteers could usefully contribute to the Rakudo effort, as it doesn't have a high barrier to entry, and there's plenty of Perl 5 toolchain to steal. Nicholas Clark
