[Ns-developers] Ns-3 Regression Testing

[Mathieu Lacage]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 09:15 -0400, Raj Bhattacharjea wrote:
> Just one comment:
> 
> On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 12:24 AM,  <craigdo at ee.washington.edu> wrote:
> >  [snip]
> >  The reference traces are kept in another private repo on code.nsnam.org.  It
> >  will be cloned transparently during execution so you don't have to worry
> >  about that.  Eventually we will have an ns-3-ref-traces directory that
> >  parallels our release directory.  We have this separate repository to avoid
> >  storing the possibly very large trace files in the main code repository.
> 
> The clone referred to means "hg clone".  I am fine with this for
> developers, but it adds an extra dependency on mercurial for other
> regular users who will have gotten ns-3 from a tarball release (they
> have no need for mercurial).  One of the most frustrating things is
> unexpected dependencies when running a script you didn't write.  I'm
> also assuming here that the regression script will run automatically
> at the end of compilation eventually, much like ns-2's installer does
> validation at its end?

I would expect that to be run by a special separate target. i.e., it
would be nice to keep the build targets clean from testing :) Maybe we
can hook in ./waf check or add an extra ./waf --run-regression-tests.

> 
> Could we tarball up the reference traces with everything else for
> releases?  Since the concern is unnecessarily bloating our repos /

This sounds like a great idea.

> tarballs with trace files however, the other option I see to perform
> the clone is to use something that a regular non-developer type is
> more likely to have installed:  something like scp, rsync, wget, curl,
> etc.  I can't imagine there is a *nix machine out there that doesn't
> have scp, although I'm not sure if it's presence is part of the POSIX
> spec.

I would tend to rely on wget.

Mathieu