Re: [boost] Getting Started Testing with Linux virtual machine on Windows host

Subject: Re: [boost] Getting Started Testing with Linux virtual machine on Windows host
From: Tom Kent (lists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-12-18 17:40:43

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Vladimir Prus <ghost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On 17.12.2013 17:58, Beman Dawes wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 1:59 PM, James Sharpe <mail_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>> Why not create a vagrant config for this: http://www.vagrantup.com?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Very interesting! I had never heard of Vagrant.
>>
>> Dave Abrahams has voiced the opinion that a test-on-demand setup moving
>> Boost closer to a continuous integration environment would be a lot easier
>> to implement if the testers were running in uniformly configured virtual
>> machines.
>
>
> What 'uniformly configured' means exactly? I don't think that could mean
> that all
> Linux testers use VM with Ubuntu 13.10 32-bit, since that would not detect
> any
> RHEL5 64-bit bugs?
>
> - Volodya
>

I agree, we've never had very uniform configuration before, but that
meant we've had a lot of diversity in our tests. Though this makes
setting up a tester more difficult, it gives us a lot of unique
coverage. I'd consider this a huge plus, with the correlating downside
being that it can be very difficult to get a test runner setup.

Another way to think about our great diversity, look at the platforms:
AIX, FreeBSD (also Mac), Linux, Windows. Then multiply them by all the
different compiler+library configurations: gcc-4.[4-8], gcc* with
cpp[98,11,1y], clang-3.[0-4], clang* with libstd++, intel-[11,12,13],
msvc-[8-12], msvc with stlport, borland?, gcc* mingw, and more! We
would literally need hundreds of setups to get all those combinations.

Plus, I think several of the people who run tests don't have them
running in a VM, they just kick them off from the command line.
(Although all my teeks99-* tests are  run with the exact same VM
image...one for linux one for windows.)

Speaking of windows, I get the impression from reading the vagrant
site that they don't work well with windows. The only reference I
found to vagrant with windows was this github repo:
https://github.com/WinRb/vagrant-windows which indicated that you
would need to have a base windows VM image. In this case, licensing
would obviously preclude it from being distributed amongst testers.

One idea for the windows side, is to ask if Microsoft would be
interested in donating some Azure virtual machines to dedicate to
boost visual studio testing. We could get one machine image setup for
each of the five supported compilers and then use a vagrant-like
system to work with a CI scheduler to test those compilers.

Tom