[pypy-dev] Slight worries

[Jacob Hallén]

I try to follow the discussions on IRC regularly, and I have some worries 
after what I have seen in the last couple of weeks.

There seem to be too many problems with broken checkins. The translation 
breaks, tests stop working etc. While I understand that running tests takes 
an enormous amount of time, it worries me that we have to fix things on the 
trunk so very often. I think this eats up time that could be better spent.

If people need to leave testing for automated tests, there ought to be a less 
disruptive way of doing this.

Of course I may be wrong, and this is really the optimal way of moving 
forward, but the I would like to be reassured that it is that  way.

A second thing that is bothering me is that there does not seem to be a 
canonical list of software that our development system is designed to work 
with. I feel that this is important. It is difficult enough to make things 
work with a specific set of tools. Currently we should be making sure that 
things work with one set of tools and the generalization to various different 
versions of pygame, grapviz, gcc and whatnot can happen later. I know this is 
not quite attainable, since preferred versions of the various tools don't 
work on all platforms, but I hope you see the core point. Trying to make 
things work with all possible combinations of peripheral software will just 
generate lots and lots of work. We need a public stance on what we support.

Jacob Hallén