OE breakages, was: Re: fakeroot fails to build

[Koen Kooi <k.kooi@student.utwente.nl>]

On 25-02-09 16:14, Mike (mwester) wrote:

> ((Also, are there any non-angstrom distros still left in OE, besides
> SlugOS?  I really feel like I'm swimming upstream all the time with OE
> -- things break for me so often that just don't seem to affect anyone
> else...))

Things break often<period>

I'm 'fortunate' enough to be able to spend 2 hours every day fixing 
breakages for angstrom, so I can get a working demo for my presentation 
at the bossaconference. Thanks to all the people in the beagleboard 
community I get notified of breakages pretty much the instant they 
happen, which makes finding the cause a lot easier.

This also means that my 'OE time' is almost completely filled with 
bugfixing, instead of working that is fun. I've been trying to push for 
better testing frameworks and removing the taboo stamp from the word 
'review'.

The review bit seems to gaining traction, but 'testing' is still a alien 
and mystic concepts for a lot of OE committers. Worse, some people turn 
*off* testing frameworks like insane.bbclass!

Maybe it's time for OE to consider whether it really wants a zillion 
commits per day or only a few tested commits per day. Having a ton of 
active developers means nothing when people using OE can never get a 
build completed due to all the small, but fatal bugs appearing lately.

I'm close to finishing the new stable branch manifesto which lists 
options and procedures to make it easier to do releases of OE (not 
builds, releases of the metadata itself) and track regressions, but it 
would need about 3 or four people spending a few hours on it every week, 
which sadly might not be feasible, since the .dev branch is too nice and 
shiny compared to any branch.

regards,

Koen