[racket-dev] DrDr Feature Request

From: Robby Findler (robby at eecs.northwestern.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 8 12:00:04 EDT 2011

PS: I'm also happy if this class of tests only emails the responsible
person, and not the pusher.

Robby

On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> I like the two-times-in-a-row thought.
>
> FWIW, please try to avoid race conditions of the second kind.
>
> I think the drracket test suites are special because they fail
> not-so-often and I don't actually know how to fix them.  If either of
> those weren't true then I'd say they should just not run in drdr. (So
> the race-condition/using the same file thing fails this test.)
>
> Robby
>
> On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 10:56 AM, Vincent St-Amour <stamourv at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> I love DrDr, but there's a small thing that annoys me about it.
>>
>> Some tests are prone to intermittent failures. For example, some
>> benchmarks need to create a file, and several benchmarks share the
>> same file, which leads to race conditions. Similarly, some DrRacket
>> tests sometimes fail for focus reasons.
>>
>> So, whenever someone pushes, they may get failures from these tests,
>> then have go look at the actual errors, and try to figure out if they
>> actually broke something or not.
>>
>> (Or, they ignore these failures, which is bad.)
>>
>> Here are two potential solutions. Let's assume that I just pushed
>> something, and a test started failing.
>>
>> - Have DrDr send me email for every push about the broken test for as
>>  long as it fails. If I get email more than once, it's likely that I
>>  actually broke something. If I only get email once, the problem went
>>  away on its own, and was likely an intermittent failure.
>>
>> - Have the possiblity to flag some tests as intermittent (something
>>  like `drdr:random'), and only report failures for these tests if
>>  they fail twice in a row. This would reduce the amount of noise,
>>  since I expect most of these tests to pass most of the time. Actual
>>  breakage would still be detected, since it's unlikely that such
>>  failures would go away on their own. Detection would happen one push
>>  late, but that shouldn't be too much of an issue.
>>
>>  Or, maybe only notify the pusher after two failures in a row, but
>>  notify the responsible person right away.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>>
>> Vincent
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>



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