Re: [stellation-res] Getting involved

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 02:27, Kevin O'Neill wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been lurking here for a while and I think it's about time I rolled
> up my sleves and got a little dirty.
> 
> I'd like to start by doing regular builds and running the test suite
> with my configuration, is this of use?

No matter what your configuration is, having another person trying 
things out, making sure that it all works in another environment is
valuable. Definitely, join in, pull the code from CVS, and see if it
works.

If you're interested, we really need some help with our patch 
audits. We've at least temporarily adopted a work method where 
we don't check in changes until someone else has looked them over
and validated them. You don't need to be an expert on the system
to do this, and we're very short of people at the moment: we've
lost two committers in the last three weeks, and another one is
suffering from hardware problems, so we're *really* in need of
some help. Without it, I think we're going to have to abandon the
audited checkin process, because it's not sustainable with the
number of people we have.

There are, basically, two steps to the audit process,
and neither requires deep knowledge of the system.

The first step is to look at the change. You can do it using the
Eclipse patch process: when you apply a patch, it will offer to show
you all of the changes in the patch, as a side-by-side
pre-change/post-change view. The idea of looking things over isn't
necessarily to do a deep analysis and make sure that everything
about the change is perfect, but rather to look at the change, and
make sure that you don't see anything obviously wrong. 

The second step is to apply the change and verify that the tests 
run with the changes in place. 

Feel free to send mail to the list, or to me privately, if you have
questions about anything.

	-Mark

-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
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