Monday, October 25, 2021

A call for more downstream testing of Meson

As Meson gets more and more popular, the number of regressions also grows. This is an unvoidable fact of life. To minimize this effort we publish release candidates before the actual releases. Unfortunately not many people use these so many issues are not found until after the release (as happened with 0.60.0).

For this reason we'd like to ask more people to test these rcs on their systems. It's fairly straightforward.

Testing individual projects

If you have a CI that installs Meson using pip, this is easy. You can tell Pip to use prerelease versions with the --pre flag.

pip install --pre meson

If you use prebuilt images rather than reinstalling on every build, do update your images once a week. Meson releases happen traditionally on Sunday evenings European time.

Testing if you are a distro or similar

The release candidates are packaged and uploaded to Debian experimental, so if you can use those, it is the simplest solution. They are not uploaded to unstable as I was instructed not to do so because of breakage potential. If you are a Debian person and know that the above explanation is incorrect and that I should be doing something else, let me know so I can change how that is done.

If you have some different setup that has a full CI run (hopefully something smaller than a full Debian archive rebuild) then doing that with the rc version would be the best test.

If you don't have such a test suite, you'll probably want to set one up for other reasons as well. :)