Re: Two weeks to feature freeze

Nigel J. Andrews wrote:

>On Thu, 26 Jun 2003, Thomas Swan wrote:
>  
>
>>Is it possible the sourceforge compile farms could be used for some of 
>>the automated testing?  I'm not sure how that system works, but it could 
>>be worth looking into.
>>    
>>
>
>Isn't the sourceforge license very scary and along the lines of "whatever you
>put on here we own it's just we tend not to persue that at the moment as
>there's not much money in it for us but that doesn't stop us from claiming it 
>at some indeterminate time in the future"?
>
If it's that intrusive, then it was a bad idea.  But, I didn't find
anything like that on their Terms of Use
<http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=6048&group_id=1>
page.  The compiler farm has a relatively small number of platforms, but
perhaps it would be enough to get started with at least verifying an
automated test would work. See Guide to the Sourceforge Compile Farm
<http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=762&group_id=1>.

In terms of implementation, I was thinking of something like the following.
   * clean the source, destination directories   * pull latest CVS tip down.   * record environment / installed
packages  * loop - on different options ( w/ or w/o krb5, w/ or w/o ssl, etc. )         o make clean         o
configurewith sets of options         o compile               + log messages               + analyze errors ( perhaps
gatherstatitistics:                 warnings, failures, notices, etc.)         o (run / install) if successful
orun tests               + output results (perhaps to HTML)               + compare results with expected
+record differences if any | gather aggregate information         o uninstall  / clean up   * end loop
 

Perhaps there could be an occasion where the test would be able to put
in a corrupt WAL or a corrupt table to do regression tests for recovery
of errors.

Of course, these are just ideas and I'm not sure how practical it is to
do any of them.  I just am really concerned about the uninstall/clean up
phase and how that can be done in an orderly fashion.   Unless the
process can start from a clean state again, then it won't be valid.   At
one point I had even given thought, vainly,  to purchasing VMWare for
such an occasion.  Suggestions?