Re: 8.5 release timetable, again

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Peter Eisentraut<peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> On tor, 2009-08-27 at 09:58 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>> To get positive results in which you can have confidence, you have to
>> know that the testing which was done actually did a reasonably good
>> job exercising the code in a way that would have flushed out bugs, had
>> any been present.  That sounds a lot like the definition of a
>> regression test suite.  Of course, we have that already, but it's
>> nowhere near comprehensive.  Maybe we should be looking at an expanded
>> test suite that runs on a time scale of hours rather than seconds.
>> Actually, didn't Peter talk about something like this at PGCon?
>
> Let's look at it this way: If I were writing a compiler, then I would
> have two main test approaches.  First, I would have an in-tree test
> suite that compiles a bunch of example code snippets and checks that the
> results are reasonable.  Call that a regression test.  It would be
> informed by code coverage analysis and previously reported bugs.
> Second, as part of my release cycle, I would have an agenda to try to
> compile a large set of real programs against my new compiler version.
> I would do that during the beta period.  You will notice that GCC pretty
> much operates that way.
>
> We have regression tests.  They could and should be expanded.  That's a
> developer job, and we can start working on that now.  But this
> discussion was about what to do during beta.  And I think during beta
> you want to test PostgreSQL against a large set of real applications.
> But we could try to clarify how to actually do that in an organized way.
>
> Now, if you want to improve the regression tests, I would suggest going
> through the commits since 8.4beta and since 8.4.0 final release and ask
> how these problems could have been prevented or caught earlier.  I
> suppose a test suite for WAL might be part of the answer, but a closer
> analysis might be insightful.

What I want to do is address the concern about too much of any given
year being consumed by beta and CommitFest. I'm not sure I know how
to do that though.

...Robert