[phobos] FreeBSD test machine

[Brad Roberts]

On Sunday, September 25, 2011 11:27:21 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Sunday, September 25, 2011 23:14:37 Brad Roberts wrote:
>> The freebsd/32 box is running 8.1-RELEASE.  The /usr/share/zoneinfo has
>> a predictable set of files in it all dated Jul 19, 2010.  The
>> FreeBSD/64 box is 8.2 and the files are dated Feb 16, 2011.  Define
>> "not up to date".
>>
>> I can create you an account on either or both if you want.
>
> Well, Chile has been messing around with their DST on a yearly basis for the 
> last two or three years, and it appears that whenever the files were updated 
> for this year's DST switches, it was too recent for either version 8.1-RELEASE 
> of FreeBSD or version 8.2 of FreeBSD, given that std.datetime's tests are 
> failing for America/Santiago on both when testing the DST switches of this 
> year. So, either the time zone packages on those machine need to be updated 
> (which may or may not be reasonable - I've never used any of the BSDs, so I 
> don't know), or I'm going to have to figure out how to redo the tests so that 
> they work with the time zone files which are on those machines (which may or 
> may not be easy, given that the main problem with picking valid DST tests is 
> that Windows has the DST switches wrong something like 90% of the time).
>
> So, ideally, the time zone files on those boxes would be updated, but if that's 
> not reasonable, I'm going to have to figure out how to rework the DST unit 
> tests.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Frankly, if the tests are that sensitive, the problem is the tests.  A Joe Random downloader of the source should be
able to expect the code to compile and past tests on a reasonably modern os.  I'd argue that 8.x is modern enough (more
so given that last I checked, 8.2 was the most recent 8.x release).  The job of the unit tests is to test the code, not
how up to date the distribution is.