Re: PSPP-BUG: PSPP make check errors [cross posting to address@hidden]

[John Darrington]

These are very valid and helpful points.  I wasn't even aware of
"platform-testers".

Thanks to Ruth for reporting this problem and thanks to everyone
else for diagnosing it.

J'

On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 06:20:26PM -0400, Jeffrey Walton wrote:
     
     The PSPP folks did not make an announcement on the platform-testers
     mailing list. Cf.,
     https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/platform-testers/. Pre-release
     testing may have identified the issue before release.
     
     Maybe the GNU Coding Standards should (1) tell a maintainer to build a
     release candidate before a release, and (2) make an announcement on
     platform-testers . Currently neither platform-testers nor release
     candidates are discussed in the manual. [1]
     
     Solaris 11 testing may have caught the issue, but there's another
     problem on Solaris:
     
        checking whether makeinfo supports @clicksequence... yes
         checking whether makeinfo generates broken DocBook XML... yes
         checking for dot... no
        ./configure: line 16169: syntax error at line 16200: `newline' 
unexpected
     
     This particular [testing] problem is not limited to PSPP. Other
     projects do the same, and they also find they have problems after a
     release.
     
     In the post-mortem analysis, this is a procedural problem in the
     release process. The release process has gaps and needs a control to
     contain the risk. In this case I think the control to place is:
     document release candidate testing in the manual. That puts everyone
     on the same page and ensures some coverage to catch some of these
     problems.
     
     Jeff
     
     [1] https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html