First of all, let me thank each and every one of you who has ever sent
in a build-report. The information contained in those reports is
potentially invaluable and I'm sure that I speak for everyone on the
Review Board when I say we appreciate them very much.
It's the "potentially invaluable information" that this message is
about. I've just thrown together a PostgreSQL database to collect all
this wonderful information.[1] It'll be a little while before I'll be
able to generate anything useful from it.
So this database will become a useful tool for us, we need two things:
a) Good quality records.
b) Lots of them.
To get a), we need build reports that contain the output from 'make',
especially 'make check'. To get b), you just have to 'M-x build-report'
to send in a report each and every time you build XEmacs.
With that in mind, I'd like to encourage *everyone* to *always* do a
'make check', saving it's output to $srcdir/xemacs-make-check.err, and
to *always* send in a report whenever you build.
Adrian Aichner wrote an excellent XEmacs package called "build" (yes
we distribute it with the other packages), it automates most of the
process, and makes sure we get what we need in the build-reports.
If you don't wish to use Adrian's package, make sure you redirect
make's output to a file. I do it like this:
make 2>&1 | tee -a xemacs-make-all.err
make check 2>&1 | tee -a xemacs-make-check.err
make install 2>&1 | tee -a xemacs-make-install.err
I pipe through 'tee' so I can watch it as it happens. And the *.err
files are the default files that 'build-report' looks for.
Let me or Adrian know if you have any problems with sending reports or
using the "build" package.
If this database proves to be as useful as I think it will, I'll
probably provide remote access to it to select people.
Thanks very much people, I'm looking forward to being inundated with
build-reports.:-)
Footnotes:
[1] I should note here that I am not collecting any personal
information like names and email addresses etc.
--
|---<Steve Youngs>---------------<GnuPG KeyID: 10D5C9C5>---|
| XEmacs - The only _______ you'll ever need. |
| Fill in the blank, yes, it's THAT good! |
|------------------------------------<youngs(a)xemacs.org>---|