[971] in RedHat Linux List
Re: Suggestions for the future
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Doug Ridgway)
Fri Oct 25 16:11:55 1996
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 11:57:03 -0700 (PDT)
From: Doug Ridgway <ridgway@routh.UCSD.EDU>
To: "Sheldon E. Newhouse" <sen1@math.msu.edu>
Cc: redhat-list@redhat.com
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
> For instance, many use Netscape 3.0. I gather that this will
> not work with the 4.0 libs. This is something beyond the control of the
> RH team.
The Netscape Java problem was analyzed, fixed, and a working RPM was
uploaded during the beta. I don't know what more I, as a beta tester, can
do.
Hell, I even wrote scripts to automatically find a couple different kinds
of inconsistencies (missing dependencies, inconsistent dependencies, that
sort of thing) of collections of RPMs. Based on the output of those
scripts on 4.0, these were also ignored.
Those URLs again:
A Java-safe libc:
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/Incoming/libc-gnumalloc-5.3.12-5.i386.rpm
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/Incoming/libc-gnumalloc-5.3.12-5.src.rpm
checkrpm scripts:
http://inls.ucsd.edu/~ridgway/qa.tgz
I have tremendous respect for the task Red Hat is attempting. Quality
assurance is hard. For NT 3.5, Microsoft had a team of four people whose
sole responsibility was keeping the daily build working. Not coding, not
testing, just running make at midnight and making sure it worked.
Microsoft spent six months regression testing the final Windows 95 binary
against every bug reported in every beta. Of course Microsoft also
released Windows 1.0, but later releases did get better.
ObRequestForMoreFeatures:
I think RPM should integrate testing suites in addition to source,
compilation, binaries, configuration files, and documentation. It's nice
to be able to say
rpm -V foo
and check the binary integrity of package foo, but it would be even
better if one could say
rpm --testpkg foo (or whatever)
and have foo's entire test suite run and the output checked. This is
useful only for packages for which developed test suites exist, but some
do (Tcl/Tk eg, or crashme for the kernel) and the development and use of
testing suites should be encouraged.
doug.
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