Re: Have we become too Intel x64 centered?

From: Robert Ramey (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2021-01-23 19:07:53

On 1/23/21 7:38 AM, Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:
> On 1/23/21 3:47 PM, Tom Kent via Boost wrote:
>>
>> I've got a couple raspberry pi 4's that are running tests (slowly, takes
>> 20+hrs to run the test suite...any earlier models just didn't have enough
>> ram). Look at the teeks99-05* (armv71/armhf) and teeks99-06* (aarch64).
> 
> I appreciate your and all other testers efforts in running the test 
> suite, but I must confess that I pay almost no attention to the official 
> test matrix these days because:

The boost test matrix is the most complete and reliable display of the 
current state of the the boost packages.  I do run the more moder CI 
stuff, but it's often failing for some issue or another totally 
unrelated to my library.  It's the gold standard as far as I'm concerned.
> 
> - No notifications of build/test failures or test completions. Having to 
> manually visit the page from time to time is a problem, especially given 
> the...
This bothers me not at all.
> - Slow turnaround times. As I remember, for some testers the turnaround 
> time was days and weeks. For others it was better, but still not as good 
> as AppVeyor, which usually sends the notification in a few hours after 
> the commit.

> - Problematic debugging. Often the report shows a failure, but the error 
> log is not accessible. This seems to be a long standing problem. This 
> makes the whole testing process pointless, as I cannot do anything about 
> the failures.

I have difficulties sifting through the test output on all platforms. 
(I've been roundly ridiculed for this complaint.  But it means nothing 
to me - I wear their ridicule as a badge of honor.)  I have my own 
solution which I run on my own machine - library_status which presents a 
table which is actually more useful to me than the official boost one 
not to mention the Appveyor one.  Now If I could get library_status to 
run as part of the CI solutions ...
> 
> I wish the current testing infrastructure was replaced with something 
> more modern, CI-style, as I don't believe the above issues will be fixed 
> any time soon.

I've made a worthy proposal for that (to be used in addition to the 
current boost test matrix).  Again, got a lot of ridicule on that one too.
>