Hi Phil,
that's probably right: there is a lack of smoke tests.
There are several hurdles before we reach today's state of the art wrt continuous delivery and regression testing
- 1) the artefacts must be built, or we won't even have a chance to run tests
we can observe that they have been broken too many times by all sort of problems, and green status is an exception in an ocean of red
problems encounterd so far are including
* work in progress in core VM or plugins
* wrong configuration of pharo target directories or credentials
(this was the case most of the 2017 year but is fortunately fixed now)
* staled or intermitent links (url)
for example, the build is loading stuff from the network (like cygwin updates)
that sometimes fail
* failure to build a library due to some tool changes at appveyor/travis
Introduction of new bugs could be prevented if feedback was correct (no false alarm).
But it's not really the case until now (lot of parasites).