Re: patches and regtest checking

[address@hidden]

On Jul 24, 2011, at 6:05 PM, Graham Percival wrote:

Mike recently posted a patch with the comment "don't run the
regtests on this; this patch is just a proof-of-concept" (or
something like that).  I think this is a great idea; let's do more
of it!  If a patch is not explicitly called "proof of concept",
then we should assume that the patch is for reals.

I completely second this and would like to apologize for wasting anyone's time with regtests.  Anytime someone runs regtests for me, it's very helpful (I am having trouble rebuilding lily from a blank tarball, so I can't get a separate regtest branch up and running).  However, I consider it my full responsibility to run regtests once I get around to them.  However however, as regtests tie up my development branch, and as I am often changing the source in ways that would make Neil blush to make my music look like I want it to look, I often want to get a patch out to the list a couple days before I can run it through the regtests just to see what people think.

I used to belabor under the assumption that people ran regtests if they saw nothing obviously wrong but wanted to test some things out: I now see that people run them as a courtesy without the intention of playing with the patch.  As this is the case, I will adopt Graham's suggestion for all future work.  I'd even go one step further in requesting that other people run regtests only if they are asked for, but I don't know if this is problematic for other individuals.

To summarize: this is a great idea, thanks to James & co for running regtests for me (it is never a wasted effort, as it always gives me very valuable information), and I'll certainly be using Graham's proposed policy in the future.

Cheers,

MS