Point releases for the GNU C Library

Posted Oct 17, 2017 14:51 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: Point releases for the GNU C Library by smurf
Parent article: Point releases for the GNU C Library

Even if it is automated, it still takes time and effort. How many architectures and kernels does glibc support? The tests need to run all of them.

Point releases for the GNU C Library

Posted Oct 17, 2017 16:04 UTC (Tue) by zyga (subscriber, #81533) [Link] (2 responses)

Lots of automated is still zero of human effort.

I think it's very reasonable to question this and if it is indeed an infrastructure problem, solve it. The Linaro community tests countless kernel builds automatically 24/7. On ARM where it still is, arguably, not very easy. Given that a typical Linux distribution has automated builders for all the architectures they support it is not inconceivable to say that we can automatically build and test this on just about everything that matters.

If the problem is elsewhere it should be clearly stated so that interested parties can examine it and come up with a plan.

Point releases for the GNU C Library

Posted Oct 17, 2017 16:51 UTC (Tue) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link] (1 responses)

> Lots of automated is still zero of human effort.
"You've got a nice lot of unaudited test output over here. It would be a real shame if the results you received somehow weren't the results you were expecting."

Tests nobody audits, in this case stuff taking zero human effort, aren't providing information to that question of "should I trust this software, and with what tasks?" They may be out of scope for the contemporary functionality, badly configured so irrelevant, or simply not yielding any or any meaningful output.

It's never zero human effort. An unchecked result isn't worth the time it took to run the tests. It's less effort than doing it all by hand, and can even be set up so that a clean run is trivial to confirm and a failing run includes clear diagnostic information about what broke, how and why, but it's literally never zero work.

We really are that short on community person-power that I'm writing this and not some tests. (Of this, I'm a bit ashamed.)

K3n.

Point releases for the GNU C Library

Posted Oct 22, 2017 15:17 UTC (Sun) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

>"You've got a nice lot of unaudited test output over here. It would be a real shame if the results you received somehow weren't the results you were expecting."

If your automated tests are failing and thus you need humans to look at them, you should better do so.
If your automated tests are passing, no human interaction is needed.

I don't see how this increases the human work. You will have to handle your failing tests anyway.