Releasing an early beta of automake 1.12? (was: Re: TAP support in automake)

[Stefano Lattarini]

On 04/01/2012 03:10 AM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Mar 2012, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
>> Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Ok, now I hear that there are still log files similar to parallel-tests
>>> (presumably using the identical facility).  It does not seem that Russ's
>>> C TAP Harness offers this quite wonderful feature since the instructions
>>> advise to re-run just the one test to see more verbose output (similar
>>> to what I have experienced from perl).
>>
>> Correct; my harness program doesn't currently have a way of storing log
>> files.  (Added to TODO.)
> 
> Regardless, I will likely use your 'runtests' test driver as a way to
> explore converting some of my test scripts to TAP since Automake 1.12
> is not released yet.
>
In case you feel like experimenting, I could release an early beta for it.
Automake 1.12 is anyway planned to be released in month or so (hopefully
before), and the code in the master branch should be in near-releasable
state (in fact, Jim has been using it to bootstrap coreutils' official
distribution already).

> I will start with tests which have little need for log files.
> 
>> Viewed in that light, TAP doesn't really reduce parallelism.  prove, the
>> Perl driver, supports running all the TAP tests in parallel, for example.
> 
> Automake already has support for parallelism.  The quality of the
> parallelism depends on how "lumpy" the various TAP tests become.
> If some are very fast and others take a very long time, then the
> slowest tests will tend to dominate the time.  Listing the slowests
> tests first helps.
> 
Right; that's what automake does in its own testsuite (mostly).

Regards,
  Stefano