[Lazarus] Lazarus Examples

[Hess, Philip J]

I guess by platform, I kind of mean the widgetset. That's really the key with Lazarus, not so much the OS or even the OS version. With a Mac, it's easy to test on carbon, gtk, gkt2 and qt, leaving only win32 to test on a Windows box. With the Orpheus port, for example, I have 4 .sh files on my Mac - each one compiles all 10 test apps using lazbuild for a different widgetset. Then all I have to do is actually run each one and note any problems. (Although that doesn't mean I actually have all the ported components working perfectly!!!)

Martin, have you looked around for PowerPC Macs? I would think you could practically get one for free these days! My 8 year old Cube still runs fine, perfect for testing.

Thanks.

-Phil

________________________________________
From: Martin [lazarus at mfriebe.de]
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 1:53 PM
To: Lazarus mailing list
Subject: Re: [Lazarus] Lazarus Examples

Hess, Philip J wrote:
>
>> Thank you for your replies on this matter.   No one addressed the underlying problem here.  I believe that all the examples should be run prior to a major release and those that do not run should be removed.  This
>> should be a significant part of regression testing.  This was clearly not done on the Intel Mac version and from your replies has never been done for this version.
>>
> I agree completely. With a volunteer project, it likely comes down to a question of manpower. Who exactly should test every example on all platforms before each release? That's pretty tedious work. However, I would submit that whoever wrote or contributed the example should do the testing. Vincent does give those of us who have published packages (see CCR page) plenty of warning before a new release to _test_ our stuff against it and file bug reports if anything is broken. Anything that's considered a regression usually holds up the release until it's fixed. The same should hold for the examples shipped with Laz.
>

Also take into acount, that most of the people who contribute, including
many of the core developers, have limited budget for hardware and
software licenses. After all people do this in their spare time for no
salary at all.

I for example have only one PC for testing. 32 bit intel architecture.
And a Windows license (one).
I can test things under:
- Vista (32 bit)
- Various linux versions (32 bit) in a Virtual machine
I can not test under:
- Mac (unless someone buys me a mac)
- any 64 bit architecture (unless someone buys me the hardware)

Similar will apply for other people. If Lazarus would only include code
by people who can afford all testing environment, there would be very
little code available.

The people who build the distros for the platform, already spend a lot
of time on this. Asking them to do *all* test by them self, would put
off a lot off people and there would be no distros being build at all.

Testing code is a contribution, same as good and as important as writing
code. People willing to contributors their time on testing are always
welcome.

As stated by Philip, the release process has plenty of time for tests.
Many are done by the lazarus team, but more need to be done by contributors.

Best Regards
Martin


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