Re: Writing a program to be executed from Make and participate in thejob server protocol

[Zack Weinberg]

On 7/18/07, Dave Korn <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 16 July 2007 23:06, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>
> > (I don't think it is practical to make the test controller *be* a
> > recursive make invocation.)
>
> My first thought would be "enumerate all the testcases,
> autogenerate and eval a target for each of them and add
> a dependency on that target to check:".
>
> Should I guess that you're worried about the overhead of invoking
> the test controller individually for each testcase, and that normally
> a single invocation of the controller runs an entire suite?

It's not so much overhead that concerns me, as setup and teardown
operations (done by the controller, once per testsuite run) and
keeping the logfiles sane.  Also, enumerating the set of test cases
and turning them into makefile targets would render the makefile
itself dependent on compiling the entire program in unit tests mode.
I don't think that's going to work well (never mind whether the user
*wanted* to build the program with -DUNIT_TESTS; it does double the
build time)

> In which case wouldn't you gain 99% of that back by turning the
> controller into a server daemon (perhaps with three instances?)

If I did it that way I would have to make that work on Windows, and I
don't want to go there.  Noticing the jobserver is something that can
be Unix-only (the testsuite will still work on Windows, it just won't
be parallel).

zw