[ruby-core:17560] Re: We'll release 1.8.6/1.8.7 this Friday

On 03/07/2008, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Wilson Bilkovich wrote:
>
> > On 7/3/08, Igal Koshevoy <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> > > Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > > Igal Koshevoy wrote:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > > Please delay the release. I don't think we'll be able to resolve the
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > remaining critical issues by Friday.
> > >
> > > > For what it's worth, this is all a strong argument for having a CI
> server
> > > >
> > > and keeping rubyspec "green" all the time. Nobody likes having to delay
> a
> > > release because there's a stack of errors to be dealt with.
> > >  Absolutely.
> > >
> > >  Is anyone providing CI for Ruby releases? Is there a good CI tool
> written
> > > in Ruby? Would Hudson be acceptable for doing Ruby stuff? Is JRuby or
> one of
> > > the other alternative implementations using something for CI that
> they're
> > > happy with?
> > >
> > >  I've been building up a shell script, mostly for personal use, so I can
> run
> > > the checks against various test suites. I attached an earlier version
> with
> > > my bug report #199 asking for patch reviews. I can mop that script up a
> bit
> > > and release versions so that others can run the full suite of tests
> > > on-demand from their  command line and or from a CI server. I've been
> > > building this as a shell script because it minimizes dependencies so
> that as
> > > long as the user has bash, svn, git, wget, tar and maybe a tiny number
> of
> > > other utilities, they can run it. Does this sound useful?
> > >
> > >  I also talked earlier about setting up a bunch of VMs running different
> > > OSes and running the test scripts against these, which would be a good
> way
> > > to catch platform-specific issues. Is there interest in such a thing?
> > >
> > >  However, if someone's already done this effort, it'd be good to know so
> we
> > > can take a look at it and possibly build upon it instead.
> > >
> > >
> >
> > Ryan Davis is working on a system for this right now. Last I heard, it
> > is nearing completion.
> >
> >
> >
>
>  Glad to hear it. I've got some spare cycles (day job starts again 8 July.)
> :) I was about to start up on this, but if someone is doing it, I'll wait.
> My own thinking was to do
>
>  1. Check out Ruby 1.8.6 from SVN.
>  2. Compile with GCC 4.3.1 with the "gcov" coverage analysis and debug
> options. I only have an AMD64 dual-core and 4 GB of RAM running Gentoo
> Linux, not a buncha VMs with every conceivable environment. For other
> environmental reasons, I compile *with* threads.

Setting up VMs for Windows or some BSDs should be easy. However, OS X
cannot be virtualized so only people with apple hardware running that
thing can test. There is the possibility to test on Darwin but it
would be probably hard to set up environment identical to current OS
X. There seem to be many people with OS X desktops but i am not sure
there are many OS X servers free to run some untested code. Perhaps
some best effort parallel execution like Seti@home could make things
easier for exotic platforms.

>  3. Run all the test suites and benchmark suites (someday, we really should
> merge those.) :)
>  4. Post the code coverage analysis, test suite results, and tracebacks for
> any crashes "somewhere". I've got "oprofile" working, so I can also post
> profiles if anyone cares.

This could also work for *BSDs that use the GNU toolchain and ELF
objects (but then there is only a small chance of platform specific
bugs here). However, the tools on different platforms might vary
wildly.

Thanks

Michal