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Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 12:34:19 +0000
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com, perl5-porters AT perl DOT org
Subject: smokes (was Re: Repost, different list...File::Spec, cygwin, Syntactic vs.    Semantic path analysis)
Message-ID: <20030111123418.GB283@Bagpuss.unfortu.net>
References: <000001c2b6c8$479bea30$1403a8c0 AT sc DOT tlinx DOT org> <20030108045616 DOT GB31411 AT redhat DOT com> <20030108152652 DOT 57A6 DOT H DOT M DOT BRAND AT hccnet DOT nl> <20030109071638 DOT GA13105 AT redhat DOT com>
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From: Nicholas Clark <nick AT unfortu DOT net>

On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 02:16:38AM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:

> I wasn't aware of that but then I haven't been reading perl5-porters for a while
> now.  I don't know what smokes is but I assume it's a periodic test run of perl
> on various platforms.

Yes, it's "smoke testing". H Merijn Brand wrote a harness script that lets
a machine burn CPU trying various combinations of configuration options,
and reporting whether any regression tests fail.

Stating the obvious, but it lets you know very quickly whether a patch you
created on one platform is actually portable to other platforms or other
compilers. Given that perl builds on many architectures, and has many
configuration options, but most developers are on Linux or FreeBSD using gcc
this is a great help. Once you have several machines on different
architectures, or with different compilers, the patterns of failures allow you
to work out what's the actual cause of a problem. (eg which of
architecture/compiler/configuration)

I guess that sort of portability conformance testing isn't that much use to
Cygwin. Then again, I know little about Cygwin or Windows, so possibly there
are portability problems between compiler versions and Windows versions.
Having lots of regression tests makes this useful, and I don't know what
form, or how numerous, Cygwin's tests are. Related to this, one of the
problems people have found with batch testing of perl on Windows systems is
that SEGVs and other failures can cause windows to pop up some sort of
dialogue box, causing the batch test system to stall.

Nicholas Clark

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