On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 1:16 PM, Anthonius deBoer <thondeboer@me.com> wrote:
Not to be ungrateful for the hard work you guys are all doing and please don't get this the wrong way, but is there any QA that is being done on the galaxy-dist when it is being released?
No worries Thon, we appreciate your feedback.
Maybe its an idea to install galaxy-dist on the main galaxy server for a few weeks, before releasing it to the public so we know it has been running and stable...
For what it is worth, this actually is our release process. The code that gets pulled from galaxy-central to galaxy-dist is a revision that has been running on Galaxy main for some period of time. We also have automated tests that run on every commit. However, neither of these techniques catches every bug. We're never happy when bugs go out in dist. There are likely a few causes of the increase in this problem. One is the wide variety of functionality now available in Galaxy, with increasing contributions from a wide developer community, means there are many more corner cases to test. This has been particularly exacerbated by increasing use of more interactive client side web technologies. These have enabled some powerful new features, but are also significantly more difficult to test well. We're currently working on a new framework for client side automated testing which will hopefully improve our ability to catch regressions.
Again...I know we are dealing with opensource and free software
True, but our goal is still to deliver a stable product (while still innovating quickly). We're always evolving and improving our QA process and would appreciate your suggestions.