[phobos] phobos commit, revision 2028

[Don Clugston]

On 21 September 2010 02:09, David Simcha <dsimcha at gmail.com> wrote:
>  On 9/19/2010 5:32 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>> All great initiatives. But the point is to verify that stuff builds
>> _before_, not _after_, the commit. Until we have Unix, Windows, and OSX
>> machines that we can all ssh into, that won't be possible.
>>
>> As unpleasant as that is to some of us, I think we need to impose anyone
>> who commits to use some Unix as their development platform. (There are many
>> reasons. One is, it wouldn't be reasonable to develop on Windows or OSX as
>> one needs to pay to get them.) Linux has wine, which is stable enough to be
>> a good test bed for Windows code. That means any of us can build and
>> unittest for at least two operating systems.
>>
>> Just a reminder: with the current posix.mak running on Linux, to unittest,
>> type:
>>
>> make unittest
>>
>> and to unittest under wine, type:
>>
>> make OS=win32wine unittest
>>
>> If somebody wants to develop on Windows and build on cygwin, that's fine
>> too, but cygwin support is not currently in our makefile. It would be a
>> great addition.
>
> I think this is unreasonable for a few reasons:
>
> 1.  It will encourage bit rot in the Windows stuff.  Wine is pretty good,
> but it isn't perfect.
>
> 2.  It will strongly discourage me from fixing a few low hanging fruit bugs
> whenever I have a little spare time if I constantly have to reboot, fire up
> a VM, etc. just to get started.
>
> 3.  The platform-specific parts of Phobos are a very small fraction of it.
>  Maybe it's reasonable to insist on testing on Unix when committing changes
> that are very far-reaching and likely to have a lot of ripple effects (like
> the one I broke the Linux builds on), but for run of the mill changes that
> aren't likely to have tons of ripple effects, it's overkill.
>
> 4.  Even if you don't get feedback before the commit, the feedback is
> reasonably rapid with Brad's system.
>
> In short, imposing this requirement on me will substantially lessen my
> contribution to Phobos.

I agree.
For a large chunk of the past six weeks, unit tests were broken on
Windows. Situations where tests have passed on Windows but failed on
*nix have been quite rare. And there are still unit tests which are
disabled in Windows because they fail, even though they pass on *nix.
(From memory, there are about five of them).
IMHO, the main problem was simply been that unit tests were not being
run at all.