On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 1:20 PM Gregory Nutt <spudan...@gmail.com> wrote: > Or don't develop custom hardware. Use COTS (Commerical Off-The-Shelf) only.
That's the easiest (and possibly best) option. Custom boards, if we ever get there, would serve multiple purposes, one being testing, another being a reference platform, and a third (and not less important than the other two) is publicity and advertising. > > (3) When #2 is complete, add software-only automated test suite under > > simulation. > > What would be the relationship between PR checks? In past Xiao Xiang > has proposed this as a step in validated PRs. I think none, at least not in the near term. These kind of tests would probably take a *long* time to run. I don't think we want to wait hours on end for a PR pre-check (which I see as more of a sanity check). So, I would make this part of the nightly tests. If a problem is found, it's limited to commits from the previous day, so we know where to look for it. > My interested would be in setting up a custom standalone test harness > that I could use in my office, independent of github tests. I don't > think those should be mutually exclusive and I don't think your steps > apply to the latter. Agreed. > I don't think we need a rigid sequence of steps. I see nothing wrong > with skipping directly to 3, skipping 1 and 2. I see nothing wrong with > some people doing 3 while others are doing 4 concurrent. These sequence > is not useful. > > What would be useful would be: > > 1. Selection of a common tool, > 2. Determination of the requirements for a test case, and > 3. A repository of retaining share-able test cases. > > If we have those central coordinating resources then the rest can be a > happy anarchy like everything else done here. Yes, it can be an anarchy; my suggestion for steps was not in terms of when to implement the different parts, but rather, when to make it a *requirement* that new changes must pass those tests. (Or when to make it a requirement that a release must pass all those tests.) We still have nightly build tests failing almost every night, so it doesn't make sense to add even more tests to our *requirements* until we get that sorted out, but nothing stops us from designing and implementing those tests. Hope that clears up what I was trying to say earlier. Nathan