Gennadiy Rozental wrote:
"Beman Dawes" <bdawes@acm.org> wrote in message news:47151E0B.4090506@acm.org...
The Win32 smoke test at 40095 is now available. See http://mysite.verizon.net/beman/win32-trunk-results.html
These tells me nothing.
Here is how you use the smoke tests: * Before committing changes that might affect other libraries, look at the smoke tests to see how many failures there are. I've added a failure count as the last row, so you don't have to count by hand. * Commit your change. (Do a single commit; one of the advantages of SVN is that it does commits atomically - all or nothing.) * Wait for the next smoke test. If your change affects a lot of libraries, that could be an hour. But if it only affects a few, the wait will be less than 20 minutes. Say 10 on average. * Look at the failure count. If it jumps up, you know your commit causes the failures. (You can verify that by the revision numbers, or by doing an svn log.)
It looks to me like Gennadiy should run the full test suite locally before committing changes to trunk. That would have certainly detected last night's snafu before it happened.
I already spend hours on testing before I do any commit. Waiting days for the full test to complete will make it impossible for me to make any changes.
For one compiler, a full VC++ test takes about two hours on a modern desktop machine. But an incremental test takes less; as short as 5 minutes for small changes. The changes you made last night caused my machine to take about 50 minutes to cycle through the full set of tests.
Most developers don't have to go to that extreme, but Boost.Test is special because so many of our developers depend on it.
And it still will leave a lot of room for possible portability failures, since I can't run on all the *unix platforms.
We aren't expecting every platform to be tested. But there is no excuse for committing code that breaks a lot of libraries for your personal desktop platform. And then no excuse for breaking Win32/VC++ or Linux/GCC for more than an hour or so, since we test those for you with tests cycling as often as every 20 minutes. --Beman