Boost logo

Boost :

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-10-16 18:37:40


Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
> "Beman Dawes" <bdawes_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
> news:47151E0B.4090506_at_acm.org...
>> The Win32 smoke test at 40095 is now available. See
>> http://mysite.verizon.net/beman/win32-trunk-results.html
>
> These tells me nothing.

Here is how you use the smoke tests:

* Before committing changes that might affect other libraries, look at
the smoke tests to see how many failures there are. I've added a failure
count as the last row, so you don't have to count by hand.

* Commit your change. (Do a single commit; one of the advantages of SVN
is that it does commits atomically - all or nothing.)

* Wait for the next smoke test. If your change affects a lot of
libraries, that could be an hour. But if it only affects a few, the wait
will be less than 20 minutes. Say 10 on average.

* Look at the failure count. If it jumps up, you know your commit causes
the failures. (You can verify that by the revision numbers, or by doing
an svn log.)

>> It looks to me like Gennadiy should run the full test suite locally
>> before committing changes to trunk. That would have certainly detected
>> last night's snafu before it happened.
>
> I already spend hours on testing before I do any commit. Waiting days for
> the full test to complete will make it impossible for me to make any
> changes.

> For one compiler, a full VC++ test takes about two hours on a modern
desktop machine. But an incremental test takes less; as short as 5
minutes for small changes. The changes you made last night caused my
machine to take about 50 minutes to cycle through the full set of tests.

Most developers don't have to go to that extreme, but Boost.Test is
special because so many of our developers depend on it.

> And it still will leave a lot of room for possible portability
> failures, since I can't run on all the *unix platforms.

We aren't expecting every platform to be tested. But there is no excuse
for committing code that breaks a lot of libraries for your personal
desktop platform. And then no excuse for breaking Win32/VC++ or
Linux/GCC for more than an hour or so, since we test those for you with
tests cycling as often as every 20 minutes.

--Beman


Boost list run by bdawes at acm.org, gregod at cs.rpi.edu, cpdaniel at pacbell.net, john at johnmaddock.co.uk