Hi Thon, James and Dannon
I fully understand Thon's frustration. I have been running into similar
situations during code upgrades of our production server.
Although the code is tested on 'Galaxy main', it is rather impossible to
catch everything, since most local Galaxy servers have a different
set-up and are used in a very different way than 'Galaxy main' (eg: I
guess you can't test the functionalities of "Galaxy libraries" with your
external users on 'Galaxy main' ?)
We go through a thorough testing phase whenever we upgrade our
production server: First a fresh install, followed by the upgrade of our
development server, and only if we are happy with the new code base, we
upgrade our production server. And still, we sometimes catch problems
only once the code is running for a few days on the production server.
We usually wait a few weeks before we work with a new release from
galaxy-dist. This allows us to add individual fixes from galaxy-central.
Hence, it would be great to get more information than just saying "This
has been fixed in -central and will be available in the next Galaxy
distribution".
Please don't misunderstand me, I fully appreciate the quick availability
of the fixes. It would just be nice to get some details helping to merge
the fix manually into our local code. - Maybe it is worth considering to
branch the code with each release, allowing to fix certain bugs on
galaxy-dist as well? I had a quick discussion about this last fall with
Dannon.
Again, don't misunderstand me, I don't want to complain. Galaxy is a
great software and it works. My job would not be do-able with out it.
Regards, Hans-Rudolf
On 01/17/2013 09:13 PM, James Taylor wrote:
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 1:16 PM, Anthonius deBoer <thondeb...@me.com> wrote:
Not to be ungrateful for the hard work you guys are all doing and
please don't get this the wrong way, but is there any QA that is
being done on the galaxy-dist when it is being released?
No worries Thon, we appreciate your feedback.
Maybe its an idea to install galaxy-dist on the main galaxy server
for a few weeks, before releasing it to the public so we know it has
been running and stable...
For what it is worth, this actually is our release process. The code that
gets pulled from galaxy-central to galaxy-dist is a revision that has been
running on Galaxy main for some period of time. We also have
automated tests that run on every commit. However, neither of
these techniques catches every bug.
We're never happy when bugs go out in dist. There are likely a few
causes of the increase in this problem. One is the wide variety of
functionality now available in Galaxy, with increasing contributions
from a wide developer community, means there are many more
corner cases to test.
This has been particularly exacerbated by increasing use of more
interactive client side web technologies. These have enabled some
powerful new features, but are also significantly more difficult to test
well. We're currently working on a new framework for client side
automated testing which will hopefully improve our ability to catch
regressions.
Again...I know we are dealing with opensource and free software
True, but our goal is still to deliver a stable product (while still
innovating quickly). We're always evolving and improving our
QA process and would appreciate your suggestions.
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