[TIP] Ideology

[holger krekel]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 09:13 -0400, Douglas Philips wrote:
> 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. :(

maybe i am missing something, but i am not talking about
isolating each test in a fresh subprocess, rather a mode
where you run multiple tests in one process and restart 
the process in case one test crashed it.  This way 
you would look for device drivers N+1 times with N 
being the number of crashes of your tests (and/or the
number of timeouts etc). 

cheers,
holger


>      --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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