Re: [Boost-testing] Branch independent testing?

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-10-14 13:47:30

Rene Rivera wrote:
> Beman Dawes wrote:
>> Rene Rivera wrote:
>>> Beman Dawes wrote:
>>>> I noticed your commit "Partial rework of regression scripts for branch 
>>>> independent testing."
>>>>
>>>> Can I do anything to help with this work? I'd really like to get testing 
>>>> started on the release branch, and would be happy to do the report 
>>>> generation here.
>>> I'm almost done with the changes...
>> Hum... I looked at src/regression.py and realized you've got something 
>> different in mind than I was expecting.
> 
> :-) My goal is to make the testing tools independent of the branch one 
> is testing. Since it's a rather bad design to have your testing system 
> rely on the same code one is testing. I know I can't completely get 
> there, because of PJL, but I can get close.

I'm really, really, worried that doing anything more than a minimal 
change will cause a delay and reduce reliability while the bugs are 
worked out.

How long are your changes going to take and what is the likelihood they 
will introduce new bugs or dependencies?

>> My expectation was that regression.py changes would be limited to being 
>> able to pass in the path on the ftp server, currently hard-wired to 
>> '/boost-regression'. I'd probably also allow the user to change the ftp 
>> server URL, currently hardwired to 'fx.meta-comm.com', but that isn't 
>> strictly necessary.
> 
> Should be easy to add in now that I've redone the option handling.
> 
>> Note that I assume that all branches/release testers will do svn 
>> updates, at least initially. The tarball is just too unreliable.
> 
> I'm keeping the tarball option in the script for now, but I won't make 
> it the default. We'll need to ask the testers to set up svn such that it 
> can get around their firewalls. Hence we need to point them to the 
> instructions about that in the svn book.

That doesn't seem unreasonable for release testers, particularly since I 
don't want them using the tarball if they can possibly avoid it.

--Beman