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

David Roundy droundy at darcs.net
Wed Mar 5 15:10:14 UTC 2008


On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 12:56:09PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> 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.

Yes, that's a good idea.  Would you like to do this?

>  > 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.

Yes, switching to bash would be good.  Switching to yet another language
would just make it harder for all of us.

>  > 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.

I believe that's essentially what I said, except that it's just not true
that failure to make the tests work on platforms for which they have never
worked will reduce darcs' support on those platforms.  Everyone knows that
windows is already a second-class citizen, because there are few or no
developers who use windows.  And macos and solaris have always had the same
problems, only to a lesser degree, because they are basically posix
systems.  (And because Eric has a Mac.)
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University


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