Re: [Boost-cmake] Testing dependencies

Subject: Re: [Boost-cmake] Testing dependencies
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-06-10 22:51:45

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Brad King<brad.king_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> David Abrahams wrote:
>>
>> I just realized we need a feature (surprise!)
>>
>> When I'm working on a Boost library, I need to be able to fire off all
>> the tests of libraries that depend on the one I'm changing, to make sure
>> I'm not breaking anything in the library collection before I check in.
>
> We discussed this at length during the BoostCon meeting, right?
> Currently CTest always runs all tests, which is *sufficient* to catch
> breakages.  The problem is that it is not *necessary* to run all tests.
>
> This is the incremental re-testing feature.  CTest is not aware of any
> build-system dependencies since they are all stored in platform-specific
> ways.  Making it aware would require implementing most of a build-system
> in CTest.
>
> The solution to this problem was the last step of those we outlined on
> the board near the end of the meeting.  We need to convert all tests to
> normal build rules using custom commands created by CMake.  Then full
> build-system dependencies are available and incremental re-testing is
> possible.
>
> This is what Troy's custom-target-per-test approach last year tried to
> do, but it was not scalable.  Instead all tests for each library need
> to be combined into one custom target that uses custom commands to
> drive tests.  I can provide more details when the time comes.
>
> However, the major step before that is to package all tests for each
> library into test-driver executables.  This is useful whether using
> bjam or CMake because it drastically reduces the total link time
> and disk space used for building tests.

Do you have any specifics available as to how this packaging would
work? IIRC, there was discussion of ways to select subsets and do
other configuration. I'd like to start experimenting.

--Beman