[darcs-users] fwd: volunteers with always-on boxes sought for automated testing

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Mar 5 03:56:09 UTC 2008


David Roundy writes:

 > There are plenty of bugs in darcs itself that I'd rather fix
 > than deal with some strange shell on solaris that doesn't work like
 > bash.

Nobody I know would disagree.  But if the problem is that some shells
aren't bash, why deprecate the tests?  Just explicitly require bash.
That costs you nothing, except some time editing the scripts to use
"/usr/bin/env bash" instead of "/bin/sh" or whatever is currently
used.  And you can probably get a volunteer to do that since it's
something a lot of people would be able to do.

 > Why would translating our tests into a different language help us?

Because, according to your report, the tests themselves are unreliable
in shell.  If that can be fixed by requiring a particular shell or
even a particular version of a particular shell, good enough.

 > David (who is not a superhero, and will not become one by the addition of
 >        even hundreds of buildbots)

I didn't claim you are or should be.  What I'm recommending is for you
to say, "Look, it's very important that the automatic test suite be
reliable on supported platforms to minimize the human element required
for debugging.  Please help make it so on your platform, or we can't
support Darcs on your platform."  Append "very well" if you're feeling
a little heroic.



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