Here are the guidelines for being an Emacs pretester. If you would like to do this, say so, and I'll add you to the pretest list. Information for Emacs Pretesters The purpose of Emacs pretesting is to verify that the new Emacs distribution, about to be released, works properly on your system *with no change whatever*, when installed following the precise recommendations that come with the Emacs distribution. Here are some guidelines on how to do pretesting so as to make it helpful. All of them follow from common sense together with the nature of the purpose and the situation. Please save this file, and reread it when a new series of pretests starts. * Get the pretest from gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-MM.0.NN.tar.gz on alpha.gnu.org. * After a few days of testing, if there are no problems, please report that Emacs works for you and what configuration you are testing it on. * If you want to communicate with other pretesters, send mail to emacs-pretesters@gnu.org. I don't use that mailing list when I send to you because I've found that mailing lists tend to amplify random noise into long discussions or even arguments, and that can waste a lot of time. But when you have a reason to ask other pretesters for help, you can do it that way. * It is absolutely vital that you report even the smallest change or departure from the standard sources and procedure. Otherwise, you are not testing the same program that we asked you to test. Testing a different program is usually of no use whatever. It can even cause trouble, if you fail to tell us that you tested some other program instead of what we are about to release. We might think that Emacs works, when in fact it has not even been tried, and might have a glaring fault. * Don't use a site-load.el file or a site-init.el file when you pretest. Using either of those files means you are not testing Emacs as a typical site would use it. Actually, it does no harm to test Emacs with such customizations *as well as* testing it "out of the box". Anything you do that could find a bug is useful, as long as you make sure we know exactly what you did. The important point is that testing with local changes is no substitute for testing Emacs exactly as it is distributed. * Even changing the compilation options counts as a change in the program. The Emacs sources specify which compilation options to use. Some of them are specified in makefiles, and some in machine-specific configuration files. They also give you ways to override this--but if you do, then you are not testing what ordinary users will do. Therefore, when pretesting, it is vital to test with the default compilation options. (Testing with a different set of options can be useful *in addition*, but not *instead of* the default options.) * The machine and system configuration files of Emacs are parts of Emacs. So when you test Emacs, you need to do it with the configuration files that come with Emacs. If Emacs does not come with configuration files for a certain machine, and you test it with configuration files that don't come with Emacs, this is effectively changing Emacs. Because the crucial fact about the planned release is that, without changes, it doesn't work on that machine. To make Emacs work on that machine, we would need to install new configuration files. That is not out of the question, since it is safe--it certainly won't break any other machines that already work. But you will have to rush in the legal papers to give the FSF permission to use such a large piece of text. * Look in the etc/MACHINES file. The etc/MACHINES file says which configuration files to use for your machine, so use the ones that are recommended. If you guess, you might guess wrong and encounter spurious difficulties. What's more, if you don't follow etc/MACHINES then you aren't helping to test that its recommendations are valid. The etc/MACHINES file may describe other things that you need to do to make Emacs work on your machine. If so, you should follow these recommendations also, for the same reason. * Send your problem reports to emacs-pretest-bug@gnu.org, not bug-gnu-emacs. Sometimes we won't know what to do about a system-dependent issue, and we may need people to say what happens if you try a certain thing on a certain system. When this happens, we'll send out a query. * Don't delay sending information. When you test on a system and encounter no problems, please report it right away. That way, we will know that someone has tested Emacs on that kind of system. Please don't wait for several days "to see if it really works before you say anything." Tell us right away that Emacs seems basically to work; then, if you notice a problem a few days later, tell us immediately about that when you see it. It is okay if you double check things before reporting a problem, such as to see if you can easily fix it. But don't wait very long. A good rule to use in pretesting is always to report every problem on the same day you encounter it, even if that means you can't find a solution before you report the problem. I'd much rather hear about a problem today and a solution tomorrow than get both of them tomorrow at the same time. * Make each bug report self-contained. If you refer back to another message, whether from you or from someone else, then it will be necessary for anyone who wants to investigate the bug to find the other message. This may be difficult, it is probably time-consuming. To help save our time, simply copy the relevant parts of any previous messages into your own bug report. In particular, if we ask you for more information because a bug report was incomplete, it is best to send me the *entire* collection of relevant information, all together. If you send just the additional information, that makes extra work for us. There is even a risk that we won't remember what question you are sending the answer to. * When you encounter a bug that manifests itself as a Lisp error, try setting debug-on-error to t and making the bug happen again. Then you will get a Lisp backtrace. Including that in your bug report is very useful. * For advice on debugging, see etc/DEBUG. * Debugging optimized code is possible, if you compile with GCC, but in some cases the optimized code can be confusing. If you are not accustomed to that, recompile Emacs without -O. One way to do this is make clean make CFLAGS=-g * Configure tries to figure out what kind of system you have by compiling and linking programs which calls various functions and looks at whether that succeeds. The file config.log contains any messages produced by compilers while running configure, to aid debugging if configure makes a mistake. But note that config.cache reads: # Giving --cache-file=/dev/null disables caching, for debugging configure. or more simply, rm config.cache ./configure * Don't try changing Emacs *in any way* during pretest unless it fails to work unchanged. * Always be precise when talking about changes you have made. Show things rather than describing them. Use exact filenames (relative to the main directory of the distribution), not partial ones. For example, say "I changed Makefile" rather than "I changed the makefile". Instead of saying "I defined the MUMBLE macro", send a diff. * Always use `diff -c' to make diffs. If you don't include context, it may be hard for us to figure out where you propose to make the changes. So we might ignore your patch. * When you write a fix, keep in mind that we can't install a change that *might* break other systems without the risk that it will fail to work and therefore require an additional cycle of pretesting. People often suggest fixing a problem by changing config.h or src/Makefile to do something special that a particular system needs. Sometimes it is totally obvious that such changes would break Emacs for almost all users. We can't possibly make a change like that. All we can do is ask you to find a fix that is safe to install. Sometimes people send fixes that *might* be an improvement in general--but it is hard to be sure of this. I can install such changes some of the time, but not during pretest, when I am trying to get a new version to work reliably as quickly as possible. The safest changes for us to install are changes to the s- and m- files. At least those can't break other systems. Another safe kind of change is one that uses a conditional to make sure it will apply only to a particular kind of system. Ordinarily, that is a bad way to solve a problem, and I would want to find a cleaner alternative. But the virtue of safety can make it superior at pretest time. * Don't suggest changes during pretest to add features or make something cleaner. Every change risks introducing a bug, so I won't install a change during pretest unless it is *necessary*. * If you would like to suggest changes for purposes other than fixing user-visible bugs, don't wait till pretest time. Instead, send them after we have made a release that proves to be stable. That is the easiest time to consider such suggestions. If you send them at pretest time, we will have to defer them till later, and that might mean we forget all about them. * In some cases, if you don't follow these guidelines, your information might still be useful, but we would have to do more work to make use of it. That might cause it to fall by the wayside. Local Variables: mode: text End: # arch-tag: caf47b2c-b56b-44f7-a760-b5bfbed15fd3