[racket-dev] DrDr Feature Request

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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