Re: [Docutils-develop] Publishing to string

[David G. <go...@us...>]

Aahz wrote:
> Actually, it now looks like a snapshot bug.

What's a snapshot bug?

> I've been mulling over whether I should suggest this,

Never hesitate to suggest something potentially useful!

> but it seems to me that snapshots probably ought to pass a
> regression suite before being uploaded, and perhaps only get updated
> once per day or so.  Seems to me that anyone who really cares about
> the latest files can grab them from CVS, and snapshots would have a
> bit more consistency to them, even if they're not formal releases.

The snapshots were originally put in place for people who, for
whatever reason, *don't* have access to CVS.  They know who they
are. ;-)  But I find snapshots useful too.

I used to have the snapshots updated once per day, but then I'd find
myself racing to commit files before the cutoff time, or manually
updating them if I was late.  The former is ridiculous, and the latter
a waste of time.  So I switched to hourly.

I'm all for adding more tests.  I (almost) always run
docutils/test/alltests.py before committing anything, which runs all
the unit tests under the docutils/test directory.  The test suite
doesn't have any regression or functional testing yet.  Any
volunteers?

And I'd be in favor of making passing the test suite a prerequisite to
snapshot update, but only if the process were completely automatic.
The update script (in CVS at
sandbox/davidg/infrastructure/docutils-update) could be modified to
only update the snapshots if files have actually changed in CVS
(saving some SourceForge server cycles), and run the tests before
changing the snapshot.  It could even be rewritten in Python!

But I'm too busy to do it myself, and I don't feel the itch.  I'll add
it to the to-do list, and await a champion.

-- 
David Goodger  <go...@us...>  Open-source projects:
  - Python Docutils: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/
    (includes reStructuredText: http://docutils.sf.net/rst.html)
  - The Go Tools Project: http://gotools.sourceforge.net/