Yeek. Some hackles seem to getting raised.
I am one of the people who support a more stringent regression test.
Bruce, I don't think anyone in their right mind could possibly accuse you
of doing less than a superhuman job here. So I think there's no need for
you to react defensively.
But the fact remains that I, for one, am not going to recommend PG for any
app that I'm not going to check myself on a daily basis. Not when normal
queries like the one that started this mess can cause crashes that will
never be detected, even if they always did do that.
And yes, there has been support from the peanut gallery, as I think Tom
pointed out, and no, nobody's asked for money. And yes, the "big guys"
can be far more cavalier about saying "Oh, yes, we knew about that
problem, it'll be fixed in the next release hopefully." But what we're
really proposing is better documentation of known bugs, and the
construction of a test suite that will not only check basic functionality,
but everything anyone can think of that could be considered sort of normal
usage, and we certainly all have different ideas about what is "normal."
This, no matter what changes are made, we know where we stand. That's all
that has been said.
The idea of separating a more complete "stability test" from the present
development-time "regression" test, I think, is a valid one. By the way,
can anyone tell me why it's called a regression test? What are we
regressing from, or are we regretting having tested? OK, OK, just a
little humor.
I am perfectly willing to organize a stability test, and I am also more
than willing to start improving the documentation because I've got to
anyway to get this beast working well under Windows -- but I'm not ready
yet, because of that damnable requirement of keeping the family fed and
the bank from repossessing the house. Towards the end of the year, I hope
that the curve will take me back towards free time, and then we'll see
where we stand.
In the meantime, I would hope that all the people doing this incredible
work don't take all this amiss. You really are doing a bang-up job.
Michael
