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We put a lot of time and effort into making our releases bug-free. To our knowledge, we have not released a single MySQL version with any known "fatal" repeatable bugs. (A "fatal" bug is something that crashes MySQL under normal usage, produces incorrect answers for normal queries, or has a security problem.)
We have documented all open problems, bugs, and issues that are dependent on design decisions. See section Known Errors and Design Deficiencies in MySQL.
Our aim is to fix everything that is fixable without risk of making a stable MySQL version less stable. In certain cases, this means we can fix an issue in the development versions, but not in the stable (production) version. Naturally, we document such issues so that users are aware.
Here is a description of how our build process works:
We monitor bugs from our customer support list, the bugs database at http://bugs.mysql.com/, and the MySQL external mailing lists.
All reported bugs for live versions are entered into the bugs database.
When we fix a bug, we always try to make a test case for it and include it into our test system to ensure that the bug will never recur without being detected. (About 90% of all fixed bugs have a test case.)
We create test cases for all new features we add to MySQL.
Before we start to build a new MySQL release, we ensure that all reported repeatable bugs for the MySQL version (3.23.x, 4.0.x, etc) are fixed. If something is impossible to fix (due to some internal design decision in MySQL), we document this in the manual. See section Known Errors and Design Deficiencies in MySQL.
We do a build on all platforms for which we support binaries (15+ platforms) and run our test suite and benchmark suite on all of them.
We will not publish a binary for a platform for which the test or benchmark suite fails. If the problem is due to a general error in the source, we fix it and do the build plus tests on all systems again from scratch.
The build and test process takes 2-3 days. If we receive a report regarding a fatal bug during this process (for example, one that causes a core dump), we fix the problem and restart the build process.
After publishing the binaries on http://dev.mysql.com/, we send
out an announcement message to the mysql and announce mailing
lists.
See section The MySQL Mailing Lists.
The announcement message contains a list
of all changes to the release and any known problems with the release.
The Known Problems section in the release notes has been needed
in only a handful of releases.
To quickly give our users access to the latest MySQL features, we do a new MySQL release every 4-8 weeks. Source code snapshots are built daily and are available at http://downloads.mysql.com/snapshots.php.
If, after the release is done, we get any bug reports that, despite our best
efforts, there was something critically wrong with the build on a specific
platform, we will fix it at once and build a new 'a' release for that
platform. Thanks to our large user base, problems are found quickly.
Our track record for making good releases is quite good. In the last
150 releases, we had to do a new build for fewer than 10 releases. In three
of these cases, the bug was a faulty glibc library on one of our build
machines that took us a long time to track down.
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