Re: On the Guile-SSH future

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Artyom,

Artyom Poptsov <address@hidden> skribis:

> Currently one of the main showstoppers for the project is the
> implementation of the tests: they're failing sometimes and sometimes get
> stuck due to some kind of dead-lock or something.  I'm tired of dragging
> the current implementation with all its "quirks" from release to
> release, so there's a burning need to fix it somehow or re-implement the
> testing for the project altogether.  So I guess I'm not going to make a
> release untill the problem is fixed.
>
> Many problems with the tests are arising from the fact that Guile-SSH
> needs multi-process tests (i.e. client-server tests) and SRFI-64 alone
> that I use for tests seems to be a little bit insufficient on its own
> for such tests, so I built some kind of a testing framework upon it.

I think these kinds of tests are inherently hard to get right and to
make reliable.  These are more or less distributed computing issues: you
need to distinguish between slow response and no response, and you might
want to resort to some out-of-band synchronization mechanism (meaning
that you don’t rely on Guile-SSH itself to synchronize, say, an SSH
server and its client under test).

So SRFI-64 is not always great, but I’m not sure it’s the real source of
pain here.

(Not that it really helps, though…)

Ludo’.