[Vm-dev] Questions, communication and process
Ian Piumarta
piumarta at speakeasy.net
Fri Apr 9 10:35:16 UTC 2010
Hi Stef,
On Apr 9, 2010, at 2:23 AM, stephane ducasse wrote:
> - How do people report problems? Just sending an email in the
> mailing-list is enough?
Here are the options, necessarily biased towards my preference which
is to try to avoid having to poll for outstanding issues.
If it's a general problem of installation or bizarre behaviour that
differs between platforms, ask for help on the Squeak VM mailing list.
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/vm-dev
Pharo and Squeak users are EQUALLY WELCOME to report VM issues on that
list. Squeak has several people who regularly take the time to
forward things from squeak-dev to vm-dev when appropriate. You might
want to encourage the same thing on the Pharo list. I know for a fact
that there are several vm-dev subscribers that monitor the Pharo
list. (You might want to make it clear that Pharo uses the Squeak VM
too. This does not necessarily appear to be universally understood.)
If it's a Unix-specific problem that you think might be a bug, report
it to the above mailing list AND send me email. Fixes are best
submitted as complete modified files (not 'diffs'). (There might well
be a way to tell ediff to use diff output directly, but that does not
guarantee that your 'original' and my 'original' are in any way
related. Sending whole files is MUCH more robust.)
If it's Windows-specific, try the above list and Andreas Raab. For
Mac-specific, the above list and John McIntosh. If it's common code
shared by all platforms, especially code generated by VMMaker, send to
Dave Lewis and the above list.
VM bugs can fed to mantis here: bugs.squeak.org
The people mentioned above probably look at mantis on a regular
basis. Anything with more than four legs gives me the heebie-jeebies,
which isn't why I don't regularly trawl mantis but it'll do.
> - How a fix in one OS is propagated to the others?
Fixes that affect more than one OS are very often in the common code
that is generated automatically and shared between all the platforms.
There is no explicit manual propagation required. (That being said,
the people mentioned above are often in contact on a daily basis.
When co-ordination is required, it will happen.)
The exception is that some code is shared between Unix and Mac. John
is good at spotting commits from me that affect him, and is good at
bugging me when necessary into fixing anything Unixy that might affect
him.
> - How the user can know that?
Watch vm-dev for discussions or commit reports that say the issue was
fixed. If it is in mantis, it might even get closed too.
The above reflects how I like to work, and I can only speak for
myself. MPG from the others mentioned above might not be comparable.
Cheers,
Ian
(Feel free to forward, re-post, etc., the above as you see fit.)
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