On 16-Dec-2008, at 4:28 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

> > This level of QA testing for PU is trivial -- there's no valid  
> excuse
> > for not doing it.
>
> In a volunteer community, yes there absolutely is. The valid excuse  
> is "lack of resources" and it can only be fixed by someone (that  
> means you) actually putting in the time and effort of doing it. How  
> about it? You could start loading all the packages in order and see  
> what the first one is that breaks? That'd be a start.

Sorry, no that is _not_ a valid excuse.

Someone made the official 3.10 PU.  Someone even made the claim that  
everything in it had been tested to load (without even adding the  
qualifier "on its own").  Sadly they did not also do the obvious thing  
of trying to load the most recent version of everything in that PU.   
It is a simple, obvious, and easy test to do and would clearly have  
avoided all the troubles I have encountered.  Running all unit tests  
is two or three clicks more.

Were I the person responsible for publishing that official PU I would  
never have done it in the first place if I couldn't have managed to  
take the time to do the basic QA testing I'm suggesting should have  
been done.  Don't start something you can't finish and sure as heck  
don't publish a half-finished mess and make outrageous claims about it!

I think the real problem here isn't the lack of QA testing.  The real  
problem is the attitude of how things apparently got selected to be  
included in the official release PU.  It (for 3.10) has ended up being  
effectively just a much less usable collection of what seems to be a  
vast majority of what's also in SqueakMap, and with the only advantage  
in that it automatically selects known dependencies and sorts the  
installs topologically.  Maybe this is useful enough for experts who  
know everything about what they know they want, but it sure as heck  
isn't something for anyone even at my level, let alone any true  
beginner.

The FunSqueak image might be better for beginners, but it has similar  
breakage as Pharo -- stuff might be loaded, but it still doesn't  
work.  Running all SUnit tests in FunSqueak shows even more breakage  
everywhere in the image -- doing so actually core-dumps the VM on OSX  
not far into the over 7000 tests.

In an ideal world something like FunSqueak should be the product of a  
full load of everything in the official "release" PU, and it should be  
something in which all the SUnit tests run green after the load.

At least the 3.10.2-final-7179 image does pass most of the 2254 tests  
it includes (I get 2 failures on OSX)

-- 
					Greg A. Woods; Planix, Inc.
					<woods at planix.ca>

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