[racket-dev] Call for help testing course binaries written in Racket

A big THANK YOU to everyone who helped out testing here.  Sorry for
the long delay in responding; I've had my head down while doing the
preparations for the course.  Testing discovered three things:

1.  The binaries worked on just about everyone's machine;
2.  There are some hard to reproduce, intermittent output redirection
issues on Windows;
3.  The debian binary doesn't work on BSD.

One of our online students came up with a solution for the second
problem problem, which he made a batch script for to solve the problem
for the whole class (go community!).  We're not supporting BSD, since
there just aren't enough of us here with a machine to test quickly,
but no one in the class has complained yet.

For those interested, the assignment went out yesterday (feel free to
give it a shot!):

http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/Assignments/ParselTest/

Props to the Racket build tools for making this work so smoothly, and
thanks to you all!

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 12:09 AM, Joe Gibbs Politz <joe at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
> Hello Racketeers!  Shriram and I are running a course this fall with a
> significant online component
> (http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/OnLine/).  We'll start
> distributing course software to well over a thousand students next
> Friday.
>
> We're (of course) writing the course software in Racket.  We're also
> distributing some binaries that students will be using during their
> assignments.  I want to see how well we've done at using Racket's
> build tools to set these up.  If you could help us by running them on
> whatever you've got in front of you, we'd be very grateful.  We have a
> particular dearth of Windows machines in our group, so if you have a
> choice, pick that to test on first.  Estimated time to test: 5-10
> minutes.
>
> 1. Download a binary bundle from
> http://cs.brown.edu/~joe/private/cs173/bin/archive/ that matches your
> architecture.
>
> 2. Download the set of tests, incomplete-suite.zip, from:
> http://cs.brown.edu/~joe/private/cs173/test/
>
> 3. Unzip both the binary and the tests.
>
> 4. Locate the executable in the unpacked binary bundle.  It will be one of:
>
>   - win32-dist/assignment1-win32.exe
>   - osx-dist/bin/assignment1-osx
>   - debian-dist/bin/assignment1-i386
>
> 5. Run this executable, with the --report command, on the test
> directory you just unpacked.  You should see it print out some JSON.
> It will not exactly match what I have here, but it should be
> recognizably JSON:
>
> $ ./debian-dist/bin/assignment1-i386 --report incomplete-suite
>
> {"results": "{\"for-fail-false-not-init\": false,
> \"pre-and-post-op-mixed\": true, \"methods-self-is-zero\": false,
> \"while-evals-true\": false, \"def-not-recursive\": false,
> \"reverse-args-fun-app\": true, \"no-var-reassignment\": true,
> \"if-else-switched\": false, \"eq-not-equals\": false,
> \"no-arity-mismatch\": true, \"discard-seq-effects\": true,
> \"more-falsiness\": false, \"recursive-let\": false,
> \"discard-if-test-store\": false}", "ns":
> "39b5b31d3f53793fc0cd95e48fcadc3ae54993ab072a64744685"}
>
> If you see any errors here, please respond to me with a paste of the
> output and a description of the machine you're running on.  If the
> output looks similar to the above, you can stop here, and please reply
> to tell me that it worked, and give me a brief description of the
> machine you're running on.  If you're having fun, continue:
>
> 6.  Run the same command, but redirect the output to a file:
>
> $ ./debian-dist/bin/assignment1-i386 --report incomplete-suite > report.txt
>
> 7.  Upload report.txt and incomplete-suite.zip as your "grade report"
> and your "test suite" here: http://jotform.us/form/22408395633153.
> Pick anything for your Course Pin.
>
> Let me know if anything at all doesn't seem to be working or seems
> strange.  THANK YOU!
>
> Joe P.