[Libreoffice-qa] ESC meeting agenda - Adding topic: Broken release process when fresh become still and when still become EOL'ed

[Michael Weghorn]

On 28/01/2021 22.03, Jan-Marek Glogowski wrote:
>> LO is regression plagued product.
> 
> Yup. But honestly with the available resources, I don't see this 
> changing in any time-frame, I can imagine. One IMHO main problem is, 
> that we mainly have regression unit tests. So every change is almost 
> guaranteed to break stuff. At least for me it feels like this. 
> Everything is a lot of guesswork for me, even in areas, where people 
> claim I'm the actual expert.
> 
> [...]
> 
> You may ask: do we have unit tests at least for some of the essential 
> low level stuff I touched? Barely any and nothing I would consider 
> remotely sufficient.
> 
> [...] >
> So I can very much relate to your impression. But unless you have some 
> large new resources available for the project, we'll have to bear with it.

Sadly true.

I fully agree with Timur that our current release model (with fresh and 
still) mitigates the negative impacts, though, and currently don't see 
how that would reasonably work if we switch to a rolling release model 
without addressing the issues you outlined, or another way to 
effectively avoid more severe regressions landing in our rolling release 
version.

I'm not against a rolling release model in general, but would love to 
see such aspects addressed in a more detailed proposal.