On 12/16/05, Ken Moffat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Dan, > > what did I say that makes you think I'm hurt ? I haven't been offended > by your comments, and I hope mine weren't offensive to you, I certainly > didn't intend that. I welcome an opportunity to discuss testing, and I > intended to further the discussion. > > As I said, I'm not overly happy with farce, but it seems to assist _my_ > testing.
Just seemed that you were taking offense to my suggestions or you assumed I was taking shots at your tool. If not, then that's good because I didn't mean either. As pertains to the testing, I downloaded farce finally and had a look. I like it a lot, and I think it handles the comparison well. In Greg's scripts the comparison is not as detailed; this automates a lot of what I believe he does manually. So, that's very cool. I'm not sure I'll trust the regex replacements until I see it in action, but that doesn't stop me from manually doing the diffs on the files themselves. All in all, I think this is an awesome tool for doing the comparison and showing results. Now, I will still argue about how best to set up the test environment. I'm not a professional tester or analyst either, but it seems common sense to me to minimize the number of variables when hunting down a problem. For this reason, I agree with Greg's decision to stop short of installing all of the configuration files and immediately rebuild while still in the chroot. You mentioned setting LC_ALL in your build scripts. What if someone else doesn't? Are their results reliable? You sound like you've done the recursive build a number of times and anticipate these differences in farce. I'd rather nip that one in the bud and just keep the same environment. FWIW, this is the method I'll be taking. I'm gonna start hammering out builds on Christmas. I'll be out of town for a week, so there's nothing but spare cycles. 1. Build Ch.5 and Ch. 6. Copy important contents of / to temporary location. I could probably do this with filelist, but I'll still copy anyway. This includes /boot, /bin, /etc, /lib, /opt, /sbin, /usr and /var. 2. Iterate Ch. 6. Start Ch. 6 at the beginning, ignoring the symlink, device, directory creation and the fs mount since these have already been done. Copy / to another temporary location using the same directories as in 1. Repeat 2 if desired to a predefined number of iterations. *Note: 1 and 2 are ripped from gsbuild. You could probably add Ch. 7 and Ch. 8, but I already explained my interest in minimizing the test environment. 4. Run farce on the temporary locations from the earlier stages. 5. Ponder the exact time in my life when I became a huge geek. Iterate. One last thing. As for "running ICA", I think this is only a name. I only use it because most what I know about recursive building comes from reading stuff Greg's done, and that's what he calls it. We're both talking about the same thing as to seeing whether the build can recreate itself. I think the only difference I can see is how to set up the testing environment. We can call it something else if that helps. -- Dan -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
