Re: [boost] Boost packages?

From: Stefan Seefeld (seefeld_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-04-01 21:57:27

David Abrahams wrote:
> on Sun Apr 01 2007, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld-AT-sympatico.ca> wrote:
> 
>>> Unfortunately, I don't believe all build variants _are_ tested.  But
>>> anyway, I don't understand what you mean about modularity and
>>> slowdowns.  The tests are distributed across many machines.  If you
>>> dedicate a single testing machine to one toolchain and build variant,
>>> you can't do this much faster.  Many testers do incremental testing,
>>> so only the changed stuff gets rebuilt.
>> You are right, the total execution time is still the same. However,
>> a more modular system is more easily parallelizable. 
> 
> I still don't know what you mean by "more modular"

I mean a system that provides many smaller test suites, so users
can offer to run them individually. (That would give the additional
benefit of test-suite specific parametrization. For example, boost.python
may be tested against different python versions, something that doesn't
make any sense for any other part of boost.)

>> More testers could contribute cycles as the resource requirements
>> wouldn't be quite as high. This, then, makes the cycles from checkin
>> to report containing associated test results smaller, helping to get
>> fixes in quicker. Etc. etc.
> 
> Maybe you're suggesting that tests of the whole suite on a single
> compiler and platform could be distributed across many machines?  That
> could be vulnerable to small platform differences, but maybe there's a
> way around that.

If there are potentially 'small platform differences' they need to be captured
by the testing harness anyway. Right now we get potentially multiple test runs
with the same label (i.e. same toolchain / platform), with potentially differing
results. One way to enhance the testing harness is to more strictly control
the environment test suites are executed in. buildbot (http://buildbot.sourceforge.net/)
would provide excellent tools to move into that direction. (Rene has been suggesting
to do that for a long time, for example here:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel/119457)

Thanks,
                Stefan

-- 
      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...