[TIP] Ideology

Douglas Philips dgou at mac.com
Tue Apr 28 06:13:45 PDT 2009


On or about 2009 Apr 28, at 6:29 AM, holger krekel indited:
> sure, in the case of non-replicatable resources distributing
> tests is of limited use.  still you might benefit from running tests
> in a subprocess - I consider that a form of distributing tests.
> It allows for timeouts, and to deal with crashing processes
> etc without disrupting the test run.

That would be a great idea.

Unfortunately (and this is embarrassing), we are running the tests on  
a Windows box with proprietary device drivers.(1)
Upon loading the python shim that talks to the drivers we have to do  
device discovery to find our device(s).
I am not savvy on the all of the "whys", but finding our device to  
test takes upwards of 20-30 seconds.
Between the time to start a new process and the time to (re-re-re-re- 
re-)discover the testing device, our testing times would explode if we  
ran each test in a subprocess. :(

     --Doug

(1) - testing is almost always more "interesting" that correct usage,  
so we need to have custom drivers to allow us access that Windows  
doesn't normally permit. Further, we are using Windows. That is  
something I probably can't change :( :( :( - there are only so many  
aircraft carriers to steer, and we're lucky to be using Python. But  
those battles are really off-topic here.



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