[Rock-dev] TESTING NEEDED: autoproj v1.8.0.rc2 and autobuild v1.6.0.rc6

[Sylvain Joyeux]

The major feature added to this new releases is parallel build across 
packages. If building with 8 jobs, one can now have 3 in a CMake package 
and 5 in another. autobuild plugs itself into GNU make's jobserver 
mechanism, so this balancing is dynamic.

To test:

   - if you want to bootstrap, get the autoproj_bootstrap-dev script 
from rock-robotics.org (NOT the autoproj_bootstrap)
     wget http://rock-robotics.org/autoproj_bootstrap-dev
   - run it with a "dev" option
     ruby autoproj_bootstrap-dev dev git 
git://gitorious.org/rock/buildconf.git

Testing is in particular needed in two areas.

Due to a major refactoring of the osdeps system, testing is in 
particular needed for:
   - bootstrapping
   - arch and gentoo users
   - users of operating systems that are not directly supported by the 
osdeps

Due to the extension of parallelism across packages (see below), testing 
is needed for people that do some trickery in their autobuild files. In 
particular:
   - the use of Dir.chdir is forbidden in package handlers. Can be used 
in its block form (Dir.chdir { }) in the toplevel autobuild code, 
though. If you want to call a subcommand in another directory, use the 
new :working_directory option to Autobuild::Subprocess.run
   - progress reporting has significantly changed.
See 
http://rock-robotics.org/documentation/autoproj/advanced/writing_package_handlers.html

Sylvain