Hello, everyone. As a GSOC volunteer, I have given my thoughts on the idea "Allow SVN test suite to be run in production environments" below to get your advice before applying. Comments are welcome, thanks!
title:Allow the test suite to be run in production environments. What's the sisuation now? The tests create their own repositories, and test data is expected to be imported at the root of these repositories. This means that it is not easy to run tests in a production Subversion setup. The tests always run in a clean-room environment, and there is no comprehensive way to check how Subversion interacts with an actual production environment. Why should do so? 1. For users, if the test suite can be run in production environment, they can confirm whether their SVN server is working well and whether the data is still OK. This is especially useful after updation, or some other adjustment even breakdown on the server. 2. For svn community, test cases in real productive enviroment can be collected, maybe they covers some strange usage scenarios which are valuable but not included in current regression test suite. What limitations will meet? 1. Maybe some operations can not be test on the production environment, such as update, commit, merge. As they will add data into repositories, which is not wanted by users. Maybe these operation can run on a testing branch to advoid muddying. Is there any way to remove these test data graciously forever? 2. Be careful with data in current production repositories. Backup is neccessary, we should make sure data is not changed after running test. How to do? April 10 to June 10 Read related code, do some hacking to get familiar with SVN framework and collect requirements on which test cases can be converted to testing on production evironment. A requiremnt spec can be provided before June 10. June 11 to July 20 A TestConfiguration should be realised, in which we can set up test environment such as repositories and access protocals, if a production environment is set up, we can run test based on it, instead of running in a clean-room. In case of default, it should provide a default configuration, in which tetst cases works the same as now. six weeks are planned for the realisation of TestConfiguration. A final patch will be provided before July 20. July 21 to August 20 Converting the tests in the range specified in the requirement spec to run on production environment. 4 weeks are planned for the converting. And serials of patch will be provided, each patch for converting only one test case. -- Justin Peng
