[CMake] Call for Module maintainer volunteers

Alan W. Irwin irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca
Thu Jul 26 13:17:45 EDT 2007


On 2007-07-26 12:32-0400 Brandon Van Every wrote:

> On 7/26/07, Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> So it really boils down to this.  If the developers from KitWare are 
>> serious
>> about getting widespread testing of modules before they are made part of 
>> an
>> official CMake release, then they will test the modules with separate
>> well-publicized releases.
>
> That's not correctly phrased.  It should be, "If Kitware is serious
> about gettting widespread testing of modules before they are made part
> of an official CMake release, then they will publicize an official
> experimental means of testing them.  Other people will have the burden
> of actually testing the experimental modules and reporting their
> results."
>
> So why will the experimental testing method be widely used?  And when
> it is used, why will people report their results?

This is standard fare in most free software releases these days. To name
just a few major projects off the top of my head, the Linux kernel, Debian,
KDE, and GNOME projects do this, and there are huge numbers of minor
projects (such as PLplot) that do this as well.

The way this works is a given software package puts out a testing release,
and the cutting-edge types who are attracted by the new features in the test
release, test it, report bugs, etc.  Most software users are not
cutting-edge types and don't bother with testing releases and apparently you
are part of that majority. :-) Nevertheless, the testing release model
normally works well because there are a substantial minority that do like to
be cutting edge.  For example, with PLplot our testing releases have
substantial popularity judging by their download rate statistics, and we do
get valuable feedback from such early-adopter users.  Since we value that
feedback we make it extremely easy for users to try testing distributions of
PLplot, and I call on KitWare to do the same with the modules.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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