Re: GNOME needs VA's help?

[sopwith redhat com (Elliot Lee)]

On Thu, 17 Dec 1998 16:01:12 -0500 (EST), sml13@cornell.edu
<sml13@cornell.edu> wrote:

>Yes, well, I've bandied about the idea that perhaps VA might be able to give 
>us some kind of discount on a YMP system for doing constant builds on the 
>Gnome source tree.  This would ensure stability of the desktop that (I 
>presume) will eventually be shipped with most VA computers.  The 
>Tinderbox method that Mozilla/Netscape has devised seems (from my own 
>observation) to be a really effective way of ensuring stability and 
>accountability for bugs introduced by CVS commits.  Up until a few days 
>ago, having a stable source tree wasn't such a big issue, as everyone was 
>feverishly working to get their bells-and-whistles into the code for the 
>feature-freeze anyway.  Now that we have a "stable" branch of feature-frozen 
>code that is being groomed for a dynamite (and relatively bug-free) Gnome 
>1.0 release, I 
>think the time is probably right for a Tinderbox to be set up.  
>
>Well, with all this 
>whining and talking that I have been doing, the question has been asked 
>"why don't you set one up yourself, Shane?"  Although I do have a 
>cable-modem connection to the internet (making CVS downloads a breeze), 
>my computer is a paltry AMD K6-233Mhz w/64M SDRAM (and a 4.0G Linux 
>partition that is bursting at the seams as is).
>
>back-breaking labor for any lesser system :-)  If, however, we could set 
>up a dual-processor VA YMP server (with the latest 2.1.xxx SMP Linux 
>kernel) to do these builds around the clock, I think that the Gnome 
>source tree would see an exponential rise in stability.

I disagree.

Compilation problems _usually_ result from incorrect versions of
prerequisites, or other environmental conditions, NOT from the tree itself
being broken.

GNOME will be stable when it runs stably, not when it compiles stably. We
need people to do testing, create test procedures, and write test programs
:) Anyone have suggestions?

-- Elliot
"In film you will find four basic story lines. Man versus man, man
 versus nature, nature versus nature, and dog versus vampire."
    - Steven Spielberg