[m-dev.] Continious integration testing

[Julien Fischer]

Hi,

On Tue, 30 Jun 2015, Paul Bone wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 08:57:26PM +0000, Charles Shuller wrote:
>> Hello All,
>>
>> I've received the following error on the 3 most recent ROTDs when trying to
>> build them.
>>
>> There is no mmc on my path at configure time.
>>
>> mmc --compile-to-c --grade asm_fast.gc     --mercury-linkage shared --flags
>> LIB_FLAGS   --flags INTER_FLAGS
>> -R/home/charles/local/stow/mercury-rotd-2015-06-04/lib/mercury/lib/asm_fast.gc
>> -R/home/charles/local/stow/mercury-rotd-2015-06-04/lib/mercury/lib
>> --no-warn-insts-without-matching-type   array > array.err 2>&1
>> /tmp/mmake.MuuPTs:67610: recipe for target 'array.c_date' failed
>>
>
> I think we need to bring something like the old nightly test scripts back.

That would require having the hardware (or equivalent) to run them on.

> How did we mis this issue for three months?

We didn't, IIRC it was reported some time ago, but nobody got around to
investigating it until the other day.  The old nightly test scripts
wouldn't have caught it in any case since they didn't test the source
distribution they generated.  (Indeed, even if they had tested it, they
might not have caught it, since the problem only occurs when you install
a 32-bit source distribution on to a 64-bit machine.)

> I have been installing the Mercury I need and only installing a new
> one if I need it for some reason (eg: to build the git version).  Have
> we all been doing this and therefore none of the developers have been
> regularly testing the ROTD builds?

The ROTD builds are tested in the same way they always have been,
bootcheck, install from stage 2, run tests etc.

> It would be good to bring back some kind of testing rigor.  I would also
> like to use something more like continuous integration (CI) rather than the
> nightly build scripts.  CI will also give us more granular feedback (one
> test run per change) and will not run if nothing changed.  I started to
> investigate this in 2013 but stopped as I (then) lacked the disk space
> required for so many builds.
>
> Thoughts?

Do you have the resources (incl. time) to do that?  If so, great!

Cheers,
Julien.