Guido van Rossum wrote:
The Python test suite already has a way (the -u flag) to distinguish between "regular" broad-coverage testing and deep coverage for specific (or all) areas. Let's keep the really long-running tests out of the regular test suite.
There used to be a farm of machines that did nothing but run the test suite ("snake-farm"). This seems to have stopped (it was run by volunteers at a Swedish university). Maybe we should revive such an effort, and make sure it runs with -u all.
Hello Guido and everybody else,
I hacked together a simple distributed unittest runner for our projects. Requirements are a NFS-mounted home directory across the slave nodes and SSH-based "automatic" authentication, i.e. no passwords or passphrases necessary. It officially works-for-me for around three hosts (see below) so that cuts the time down basically to a third (real-life example ~600 seconds to ~200 seconds, so it does work :-). It also supports "serialized tests", i.e. tests that must be run one after the other and cannot be run in parallel.
http://mde.abo.fi/tools/disttest/
Comes with some problems; my blurb from advogato.org:
"""
Disttest is a distributed unittesting runner. You simply set the DISTTEST_HOSTS variable to a space-separated list of hostnames to connect to using SSH, and then run "disttest". The nodes must all have the same filesystem (usually an NFS-mounted /home) and have the Disttest program installed. You even gain a bit with just one computer by setting the variable to "localhost localhost". :-)
There are currently two annoying problem with it, though. For some reason, 1) the unittest program connecting to the X server sometimes fails to provide the correct authentication, and 2) sometimes the actual connection to the X server can't be established. I think these are related to 1) congestion on the shared .Xauthority file, and 2) a too small listen() queue on the forwarding port by the SSH daemon. Both problems show up when using too many (over 4?) hosts, which is the whole point of the program! Sigh.
"""
Error checking probably bad. Anyway, feel free to check it out, modify, comment or anything. We're thinking of checking the assumptions in the blurb above, but no timetable is set.
My guess is that the NFS-mounted home directory is the showstopper and people usually don't have lot's of machines hanging around, but that's for you to decide.
Disclaimer: I don't know anything of CPython development nor of the tests in the CPython test suite. ;-)
Best regards, and a big thank you for Python, Marcus
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