On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 01:46:59AM +0100, Claus Reinke wrote:
> i had my first encounter with the testsuite, and i thought you
> might be interested in first-encounter notes (platform: win/xp,
> cygwin shell, mingw gcc):-)
> 
> - why do i need to install python to run haskell tests? isn't
>    haskell good enough (dogfood and all that..)?

A couple of reasons come to mind:

* The testsuite driver itself is actually a pretty good test of low
  level stuff: forking, threads for timing out tests, etc. Both old GHC
  (used to build the HEAD) and the HEAD itself may not work correctly on
  all platforms, and it's easier to track down bugs in something
  smaller than the testsuite driver.

* Python, being interpreted, makes a nicer language in which to make an
  EDSL for this.

Personally I think I'd prefer a language independent DSL; maybe I'll
finally get round to writing something at the Hackathon (although not
necessarily for use with GHC's testsuite).

> - the usage documentation page is only online. it should be
>    copied into the download, for offline users.

But then we have the problem of keeping it in sync.

> - when the testsuite is pulled late in the game, and python
>    installed for it, one needs to rerun configure?

The testsuite should be made more standalone, yes.

> - following the online docs, one soon gets a testrun
>    started, only to find that the output isn't recorded 
>    anywhere, so it all has just flushed down stdout! 
> 
>    full testrun targets should record their output in 
>    tests.log or some such file

Agreed.

>    (and can it be that 'make
>    distclean' deleted my test-orig.log file that i kept for
>    comparison with after-patch results?).

If it did then that sounds like a bug to me.

>    -utf8_005.hs:2:0: lexical error (UTF-8 decoding error)
>    +utf8_005.hs:2:0: lexical error at end of input ]

This is caused by using an old version of alex.

> - it takes a lot more that 5 minutes to run 
>    'make -C testsuite/tests/ghc-regress/ fast stage=2'

This is at least partly because you've compiled the extralibs, which
means you're running more tests.

>    running the tests, from within that directory, i was
>    surprised to see tests outside that directory being
>    run (such as libraries/network/tests)

That's meant to happen.

> - libraries/network/net00[12] ran into my firewall, and
>    since i had not expected them, nor could find them
>    in the test directory (see above), i blocked them.
>    not that that stopped the testsuite in any way, so
>    it took me a while to reassure myself that these
>    were run as part of the testsuite, but it is strange
>    that the blocking does not affect them..

net001 certainly ought to fail if it is blocked. Are you sure your
firewall really blocked it?


Thanks
Ian

_______________________________________________
Cvs-ghc mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-ghc

Reply via email to