Time-based releases idea

[Maarten Lankhorst]

Hello Zachary,

2008/5/5 Zachary Goldberg <zgs at seas.upenn.edu>:
> I think that a missing factor in making this decision is the shape of
>  an automatic test suite.  Its been mentioned a dozen times and has the
>  potential to tip the scales in favor of the time-based releases
>  (making QA easier -> shorter freezes).  In the event that we are able
>  to maintain QA (by test suite or other) then +1 for time based
>  releases.  Its very convenient for users to know when releases will be
>  and makes following software much easier as a whole.
>
>  For those who don't mind the cutting edge though, I don't see a
>  problem with still keeping minor revisions every other week with major
>  revisions every 6 months, e.g: 1.x.y, incrementing y every 2 weeks
>  incrementing x every 6 months
I've been playing with automated tests, building tests on wine then
running them on windows through cygwin+ interactive sshd service. But
it seems to be flaky at best. A lot of tests still crash right now if
I run them on my machine xp which sucks and shouldn't happen at all.
Main culprits are the rpcrt4 and the crypt tests, but there might be
others too (d3d9 does at the moment, might be a driver bug).

Cheers,
Maarten.