[darcs-devel] new ideas for dealing with test errors...

[David Roundy]

Hello fellow darcs developers,

I'm very happy to have so many contributions to darcs coming in, but it's
causing trouble with the way I've been set up.  All too often, the test
suite ends up failing, and causing slowdowns.

Since it takes a while to run, often by the time it finishes (this is the
test suite getting run automatically after a darcs send) I'm at work, and
fixing the error has to wait until the next day.  Then the next day there
are new patches to be applied, and that leads to a new error, and so on.
As a result, darcs-unstable gets updated less frequently, and in jumps.  As
a result, developers don't know what patches I'm sitting on in my working
repository, and they send patches that conflict with what I've got there,
or patches that cause tests to fail, when combined with the patches sitting
in my working repository.  :(

I should perhaps mention that sometimes the reason I have trouble is that I
test patches in my working repository using ghc 6.4, but use ghc 6.2 on the
central server.  This is intentional, in hope of catching
ghc-version-specific issues, but bites me when something that is
6.4-specific gets in (and tests fail).

So my new plan for handling problems with tests failing is to no longer
require that the test suite passes before applying patches to
darcs-unstable.  Instead, I plan on setting up a cron job that will run the
test suite daily, and email me the results if there is a failure.  Once
the cron job is debugged, I then plan on sending the results to
darcs-devel, rather than just myself, which will make it easier for others
to commit test fixes.

I'm airing the idea here, since I'm not sure whether hitting the list with
a big email daily would be polite.  I could instead set it up to go to a
web page or something, but I'd rather it be something that can't easily be
ignored.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net