Re: Cruise Control to mitigate failure in make bootstrap?

[Bob Rogers <rogers-emacs@rgrjr.dyndns.org>]

   From: Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>
   Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:02:57 +0100

   Alan Mackenzie wrote:
   > I have used this product in one of my day jobs, and it works well.

   I suspect it works well in a day job environment, when you are working 
   for the same 8 hours a day as the other developers on the project.  I 
   suspect it works less well for Free Software where volunteers might have 
   a half hour to spare so they fix a bug, don't have time to do a full 
   bootstrap before checking in, then might not see any mail generated 
   because they are offline for the weekend.

Another case is where a commit breaks on a platform the committer does
not have; the smoke system alerts potential fixers in a timely way.
This seems more likely on a Free project than a proprietary one.

   FWIW, the Perl community calls this "smoke testing" [1], and has been
using it successfully for a number of subprojects [2].  I can't claim
great familiarity with it, but I think the value increases with the
coverage of the automated test suite.

					-- Bob Rogers
					   http://rgrjr.dyndns.org/

[1] http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl5/index.cgi?smoke_testing

[2] E.g. http://smoke.parrotcode.org/smoke/