[OpenAFS] buildbot and packages

[David Boyes]

> How about an effort to get nightly builds of master available on as many
> platforms as possible, and getting thousands of bored college students to
> download, install, and test them?

I think that's still overly optimistic. There's a lot of moving parts here;=
 you just can't just install a package and have it do something useful. You=
 need to have a lot of surrounding infrastructure that involves real contro=
l of a fair amount of stuff that random college students won't have.  'make=
 check' on a single machine will never give you useful testing results othe=
r than to find packaging or "smoke test" errors, which aren't all that help=
ful overall.=20

> Wouldn't that massive crowsourced testing effort be worth the time of a
> single developer to make sure *some* sort of package, even if it's half-
> assed, gets distributed? I can't think of much of anything else that has =
a
> bigger resource multiplation factor than a 'one click install', along wit=
h some
> defaults to use a 'test.openafs.org' cell.

As others have commented, unskilled testing performed without a detailed te=
st plan on software systems this complex is probably less helpful than migh=
t otherwise appear. GIGO applies here. A uncoordinated test process is unli=
kely to produce anything useful in that there have to be a sequence of coor=
dinated tests, replacing one component at a time in a known order. I can't =
see how crowdsourcing would help here.=20