[Numpy-discussion] Wanted: new release manager for 1.5 and above

[Ralf Gommers]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 11:56 PM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> > How many combinations do you test manually? All supported Python versions
> on
> > all platforms? Several Linux flavors?
>
>
> I basically assume that linux works once the branch is stabilized, if
> only because that's what most developers use. It is important to test
> on the oldest supported python (2.4) and both 32 and 64 bits, though
> (especially python 2.4 on 64 bits).
>
> I never test the installers - this is too much work manually. Ideally,
> this should be done on a build/test farm.
>
> > For someone new to packaging, how much time would you estimate it takes
> to
> > do a single release? Is most of this time spent testing, or fixing the
> > problems you find during testing?
>
> Most of the time is spent on fixing build issues which crop up during
> the beta phase. I found difficult to enforce a strict policy on not
> changing anything unless critical once in the beta phase. I think we
> should improve things in that aspect, and go away from the "but this
> is a small fix" mentality - maybe using something like for the linux
> kernel, with merge windows, etc... I secretly hope that if we can
> regularly change release managers, it will give a sense of why this is
> good policy :)
>
> I feel that we have improved things quite a bit since I have started
> doing releases: the binary installers are more stable, and build are
> mostly automated now. The next step would be automated testing of the
> binary installers (in particular testing new numpy against scipy,
> etc...), but this is quite a bit of work.
>
> Having a stricter time-based policy would be good as well.
>
>
Thanks for the explanations. I volunteer to help as well. From working on
the docs and scikits.image I am familiar with most of NumPy/SciPy, but not
with the C internals. Please just tell me if you think more experience is
needed for this role, or if there are better candidates. Then I'll happily
work on other things.

I'm using OS X, so no problem there.

Cheers,
Ralf
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