[Asterisk-Dev] Patches: Testers needed!

[John Todd]

As many of you have noticed, I am spending some time updating the 
bugs.digium.com site with lots of comments and questions about 
individual bugs and patches.

We have quite a backlog of patches at this point (close to 30!)  I 
have marked all bug notes in the bugs.digium.com site that contain 
source code patches with the string "[patch]" as the first part of 
the bug title.  This means that there is something in there that the 
author would want to see added to the main CVS tree to fix a problem 
or add a feature.  Many of these patches need to be tested to ensure 
that they do not break other features.

WE ARE SEVERELY LACKING IN PATCH TESTING.  Very few people (other 
than the authors) seem to be testing the patches that are submitted 
to the system, or if they are, they're not posting comments. (there 
are some exceptions - give yourselves a pat on the back.)  Mark 
cannot currently keep up with the volume and complexity of the 
changes being offered, and he has asked that other members of the 
community (notably on the -dev list) should start to test things from 
other authors and update the bugnotes with the results so that Mark 
does not have to do exhaustive checking on each and every patch.  Of 
course, they will all still be reviewed, but the interval for review 
can be reduced to just a few minutes instead of hours if good 
comments can be made on how a particular patch worked or did not work 
in your environment.

Some of these patches might not be specifically useful to you, but we 
ask that you test a wide menu of patches.  Due to the fact that there 
are so many variations in * servers and usages, it is hoped that a 
wider test audience will catch weird incompatibilities rather than a 
small test group using more-or-less the same channels/tools/methods.

There are many new and interesting features being offered by members 
of the community.  Some of these are not high on the list of things 
that Digium considers "vital" for themselves, but perhaps they are 
vital to you and other testers.  The only way that Mark et. al.  will 
know if the patches are "not broken" is if you update the bugtracker 
with your experiences.

I would like to gather a list of people who are interested in testing 
patches.  Please send me your name, and I'll put you in the list of 
volunteers that are asked to look at particular bugnotes after 
discussions with Mark.  Of course, I am not the manager of this 
project, so feel free to pick a patch at random and run with it.

JT