[cairo] Cairo and the GitLab pipeline

[Uli Schlachter]

On 14.03.19 17:29, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 05:24:51PM +0100, Uli Schlachter wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> since the floating point formats were merged [1], cairo depends on
>> pixman 0.36.0. This made the pipeline on GitLab fail earlier than
>> before, because now the provided pixman version is too old. In [2], I
>> propose to switch the pipeline to Fedora rawhide to get a newer pixman
>> version (*). Are there any thoughts / comments / review for this?
> 
> I suppose it depends on what the testing goal for this should be(*).

Well, so far my goal is to have some minimal QA (in contrast to the
current pretty much non-existent QA). I didn't really think about the
deeper questions so far.

Also, I'm not sure I buy that stability argument. Running cairo against
a stable distro just means that no one notices if a new Pixman release
causes cairo's test suite to fail. It does not magically make the issue
go away. Plus, if one finally updates to the pipeline to a newer version
of some distro, "everything will suddenly start failing" and figuring
out what happened is a lot harder than in the other scenario: We get a
time period "somewhere in here something was updated that made cairo's
test suite fail". That makes it a lot easier to spot failures due to new
pixman versions.

Of course, this still requires someone to actually investigate this,
which might be a problem in both scenarios. In this aspect, the stable
distro wins since we get to decide when the massive amount of work needs
to be done, instead of something broke suddenly and someone has to find
the time to investigate...

Hm. I'm unsure.

Uli
-- 
"Are you preparing for another war, Plutarch?" I ask.
"Oh, not now. Now we're in that sweet period where
everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never
be repeated," he says.