automated testing (was Re: deprecated symbol warnings)

From: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>
Cc: guile-user@gnu.org
Subject: automated testing (was Re: deprecated symbol warnings)
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 13:17:15 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <777355fd0e5fe227e533f58ba93b132a@raeburn.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <878y2c7mka.fsf@laas.fr>

On May 18, 2005, at 08:20, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> This sounds like a good idea.  However, this would need to be somewhat
> automated, like Debian's build system, still without compromising on 
> the
> user's privacy and control.  I think that's a project of its own, isn't
> it?  :-)

Definitely.

FWIW, I use a separate, dedicated account for this sort of thing at 
work.  (Not enough cycles to add Guile builds on many of these 
machines.  But maybe a couple.)  That still essentially means you've 
giving random developers access to your machine, if somewhat 
indirectly, so unless you trust them all, you probably still want to be 
somewhat careful.  There are various OS-specific approaches to 
confining a collection of processes in different ways, but of course 
part of the goal is to do testing across a variety of platforms as well 
as different configurations of certain popular platforms.  Using chroot 
only gets you so far, but UML or VMware won't tell you if you've got 
problems on Alphas running Tru64.  So I suspect a variety of approaches 
would be needed -- depending in part on how concerned the system owner 
is about access to random data on their system.

In fact, at the end of the day, I think maybe the test-running and 
result-collecting and -reporting might be one interesting project, and 
the build isolation probably several other interesting projects or 
products (UML, Bochs, Plex, SIMH, PearPC, VMware, Mac On Linux, FreeBSD 
jails, Solaris 10's ... um ... whatever they called it).  There are 
plenty of people working on the latter set.  Anyone want to put 
together the former?

And if a potential tester doesn't have much stuff that a Guile build 
absolutely has to be kept away from, or they've just got a reasonable 
amount of trust in the other Guile developers, they could use the 
dedicated-account approach and a cron job, and not worry about it....

Ken

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