[Libreoffice-qa] QA Meeting Minutes - 2013-08-23

[Robinson Tryon]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 2:31 AM, Florian Reisinger
<florei at libreoffice.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> So I am going to create one for Windows, or is there a volunteer with more Git Know-How and maybe a faster upload?

After some conversation on IRC, I think that a Windows bibisect repo
should include the first release in each of our previous release
series (3.6.0, 4.0.0, etc...), but probably not subsequent builds on
the release branches.

One question that comes up often is: Are there enough Windows-only
bugs to make a Windows bibisect tool helpful?

There are currently 1010 open LibreOffice bugs marked with OS=Windows
(compared to 893 for OS=Linux), but that list certain includes a
number of cross-platform bugs. That being said, a Windows bibisect
repo linked to a buildbot could provide not only a good way for us to
track down any regressions, but also a simpler method of pushing out
builds. There are some questions about size on disk, but I think those
can be somewhat mitigated by deciding how often new builds are added.

To step back for a second and take a look at the bigger picture, many
of the questions that come up about a Windows bibisect repository are
the same questions that arise about a GNU/Linux-based one. We've
discussed stitching-together our old and new GNU/Linux bibisect
repositories as well as adding-in some of our oldest builds
(pre-bibisect), and I think that finishing that work might give us
some insight into how we should approach bibisect for Windows.

Florian suggested that parallel installs might be a better bet for
Windows, and although I do see some strong benefits to the bibisect
solution, I think we should continue to discuss the pros and cons, and
shouldn't rule out either approach for now.

I'll try to carve-out some time this weekend to tackle the GNU/Linux
side of things and put us in a better position to evaluate our
options.

Cheers,
--R