I am currently working on a new test infrastructure for the core build which will leave the current ctest infrastructure alone, but which instead adds equivalent targets that can be run with make (or nmake). The point of this new test infrastructure is to have proper dependencies (unlike ctest) and also to be able to run tests in parallel (again unlike ctest) which is an advantage on a single-cpu machine (since these tests necessarily involve lots of i/o, one task can grab the cpu while others are waiting for their i/o to complete) and a huge advantage on multiple-cpu machines.
I have been making quick progress this week because most of the test elements were already in place for the common CMake code that is also used for the install-tree tests. All the changes I am making to that common code are to distinguish locations in the build-tree and installed examples tree (which are set depending on the CORE_BUILD variable), and to make the dependencies more complete (which also simultaneously improves the existing installed examples tests). Here is what I can do now. With _nothing_ built in the build-tree, and if cmake has been configured with BUILD_TEST=ON, I can run make test_<language>_psc where language is ada, c, cxx, d, f77, or f95. The above command generates just the minimum parts of the build (bindings and examples builds) required to do the test (which just runs plplot-test.sh for the language front-end and the psc device). I also have implemented a target test_compare_sh which simply runs test_diff.sh with no dependencies. So the command make -j4 test_c_psc test_f77_psc test_f95_psc test_compare_psc will generate our standard PostScript and stdout difference report just for f77 and f95 versus c, just like the commands make -j4 all ctest -R '(examples_c$|examples_f77|examples_f95|examples_compare)' do now. However, for the reasons noted before the new core-build test method is _much_ faster on my 2-cpu machine than the ctest method for doing testing. You probably noted that I have only referred to a subset of our languages above. That is because there are still some dependency issues to work out for java, lua, octave, etc. I won't commit the new test infrastructure until it is matured a bit more, but that is happening rapidly so there is a good chance I will be able to commit this by tomorrow or Thursday in time for you to have a good chance to play with it before the release (this weekend?) Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
