[Q] A new attempt to create a Squeak Test Server + Image Fingerprints

Hannes Hirzel hirzel at spw.unizh.ch
Mon Dec 13 12:03:23 UTC 2004


Markus Gaelli wrote:
> I think you identified a very important use case.
> I assume that you mean the newest versions of this packages available, no?
> So this would make sense on a moving target, meaning to try to load the 
> newest versions into the _actual_ image version, right?

Yes, today for example this would be

ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/pub/Smalltalk/Squeak/3.8beta/Squeak3.8g-6527.zip

and

ftp://st.cs.uiuc.edu/pub/Smalltalk/Squeak/3.9alpha/Squeak3.9a-6532.zip



> Big thanks goes to Daniel Vainsencher, who installed it, and made work 
> the first time! But somehow university got both of us distracted again...

I see. So where is the server and the last emails which were sent out?


>> I do not see the fingerprint thing to be an issue. 
>

> I did not explain it very well, I guess. The idea is to harvest all the 
> unary methods (at least the ones on the class sides) and use them as 
> "smoke tests".
> Some of them might never run, but if some ran in an earlier version and 
> now not anymore, that might mean sth.
> 
> In order to get them I was thinking to use this fingerprint approach, as 
> you want to make sure, that no side-effects of some earlier tests occur.
> For academic reasons I would be quite interested in this approach: has 
> this been done before, is it useful, is it feasible?

I see, you are looking for some heuristics to find out which unary 
methods might be candidates as test cases.

An related idea to this is to look for unary method calls and 
autogenerate test cases for the classes they belong to.

For the test cases there might be an interface / query tool for 
selecting them easily and moving them to the actual test case pool.

However the first step I perceive the very crude test

load a packacke
	succeeds
         fails

already giving 50% of the success of automatic testing.

Or even more basic just to try get working again with the most recent 
images what Daniel had working.

Or if you do not have time at least document it enough so that somebody
other in the list might have enough knowledge to help out.


Hannes




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