[squeak-dev] Re: CI as debugging aid?

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Wed Dec 19 18:49:08 UTC 2012


On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 06:06:21PM +0000, Frank Shearar wrote:
> ONE DAY, I will be able to reflexively hit the "reply all" button when
> it needs hitting.
> 
> frank
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com>
> Date: 19 December 2012 18:05
> Subject: Re: CI as debugging aid?
> To: "David T. Lewis" <lewis at mail.msen.com>
> 
> 
> On 19 December 2012 17:56, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 01:21:31PM +0000, Frank Shearar wrote:
> >> It just occurred to me that we could possibly use CI jobs as a means
> >> of debugging naughty plugins.
> >>
> >> Recall that we had LargePositiveInteger test failures crashing the VM
> >> (http://squeakci.org/job/SqueakTrunk/67/console for instance)?
> >>
> >> If we ran a full test suite on a VM with debugging support, we could
> >> gain some insight into this particular, intermittent, problem.
> >>
> >> Once 4.4's out the door, we'd just need to get our hands on a
> >> debugging VM. If Eliot built one as part of his usual publishing
> >> routine, we could just use that... *cough*.
> >
> > If you are thinking of the assert-enabled Cog that Eliot describes here:
> >
> > http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2012-December/166750.html
> >
> > You can probably just use the one that Eliot provided.
> 
> Yes, those are the VMs I mean. I'd just like to see one with every release.
> 
> > I expect that this is just a matter of setting a couple of flags in the
> > configuration step of building Cog, so you (we) can probably do this
> > easily on the squeakci.org server to make your own debugging VM. We'll
> > need to confirm which flags to set of course.
> 
> I think there was some noise around setting up builds to test the Cog
> VMs anyway, on vm-dev, wasn't there?

http://squeakci.org/job/CogVM/

This is not intended to test the Cog VMs, but it does do a VM build in
order to verify that the "bleeding edge" sources are coherent enough
to produce a VM. So if you need a locally-built VM on that squeakci
server with some specific configuration (such as debugging support),
you can easily tweak that test build to produce whatever you want.

But to be clear: These are *not* VMs that are intended for distribution,
and nobody should use them as a replacement for the official distributions
on Eliot's site. Likewise, there is an automated build of the standard
interpreter VM at http://squeakci.org/job/InterpreterVM/ that does
a VM build to check source integrity, and these are *not* a replacement
for Ian's official distributions at http://squeakvm.org/unix/.

Dave



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