Re: Thoughts from FreeBSD on the upcoming GNOME 2.2

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

Hi,

> > No,  we're not.  We know that the thread lib being used underneath it is 
> > platform-dependant, which is exactly why we want to find some way to use 
> > GThreads and then still do what we try to do.
> 
> oh - good 8-)

Yes, that's what we think too ;)

> > > So the easiest way to get people to like to test it is
> > > to timetravel back and make changes... 8-)
> > 
> > I'm not sure what you mean by this, but it doesn't sound very constructive 
> > ;) If you mean to say, "there is something about GStreamer that makes me 
> > not want to test it or help people in testing it" then tell me what it is 
> > so we can work on that and get somewhere we want to be instead of being 
> > somewhere we both don't want to be.
> 
> Developers in general - with very very few exceptions don't want to go
> anywhere near even normal problems with threads - they are considerably
> less likely to go anywhere near problems involving an additional level of
> threads built on top of normal threads. This is hardly a controversial
> statement or one that hasn't been known for ages. 

I understand - I try to stay away from poking at them as well.  It doesn't 
explain the time travel comment however which I'm still confused about, 
and it explains even less what that has to do with finding people
to *test* the code we have and provide stack traces, bug reports, some 
two-directional feedback and maybe even access to a machine to test on.

As it is, Andy (who wrote an extra cothread package) only had access to an 
x86 machine to test on (and one ppc developer helped him if I remember 
correctly), but couldn't find the people to even try and run the 
testsuite.

That's an entirely different situation than asking developers to help us 
make our code portable.

So the question is - how can we get people to *test* and *run* our code on 
various architectures so we learn about the issues ? I can't imagine this 
problem has never cropped up before with other gnome apps.

At the very least, GThreads themselves probably got testing on all 
architectures in some way.


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