On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 8:00 AM, Dr. David Kirkby
<david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
> On 07/16/10 03:03 PM, Sergey Bochkanov wrote:
>>
>> Hello, Dr..
>>
>> You wrote 16 июля 2010 г., 17:37:25:
>>>>
>>>> So if spkg-check is executed, I can be sure that spkg was successfully
>>>> installed into system?
>>>
>>> Not exactly, as some packages unfortunately ignore errors, so if the
>>> package
>>> fails to install, you will not know it.
>>
>> I  am talking about my own package, so I know that its author at least
>> tried to handle all errors during install :)
>
> Yes, I had not realised you were talking of your own package. If you recall,
> I looked at that, and found it was ok. The tests passed on a system or two I
> checked it on. You did have some self-tests, though I remarked the output
> was only shown at the end, not after each test. You said it was a problem
> with flusing stdout and it behaved differently on Linux to Solaris.
>
>>> Not  all  packages  have spkg-check files - in fact, the majority do
>>> not.  A list of the packages which have them missing can be found on
>>> this ticket. http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9281
>>
>> Looks  like  that  spkg-check  is  not  very  popular  way  of testing
>> packages.

Perhaps running all spkg-check should be added to the -testall runs?
(This may not be very practical however...given we don't leave all the
old builds around.)

> That's true, though there is an interest in improving that situation by a
> few people at least.
>
> If you look at the ticket I created listing the packages which don't have
> spkg-check files, you will see several others have added their usernames to
> 'cc' field. John Palmieri has done some work on this
>
> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9352
>
> I fixed a couple recently
>
> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9277
> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9286
> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9309
> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9308
>
> and have created tickets for fixing a couple more
>
> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/9311
>
>> Many  packages  rely  on  doctests.
>
>
>> It leads me to the next
>> question.
>>
>> I  work on test suite for ALGLIB spkg. Previous release contained only
>> computational  core  tests,  now  I  want  to add Python-C integration
>> tests. These tests will be integrated into spkg-check. So testing will
>> be done as follows:
>> 1) spkg-check is called
>> 2) computational core (external shared library) is tested
>> 3) if failed, testing is stopped
>> 4) communication between core and Python is tested
>>
>> Step  (4) is just execution of very large Python script which tries to
>> call different ALGLIB functions and to check their result. This script
>> is  automatically generated from formal description - it will allow me
>> to use these tests later in other programming languages.
>>
>> It  is  also  possible  to automatically generate doctests from formal
>> description used to generate spkg-check.
>
> I'm impressed. Sage needs more people like you, who take testing a bit more
> seriously.
>
>> So I have three options:
>> a) to test ALGLIB from spkg-check only
>> b) to generate doctests and to test ALGLIB using doctests only
>> c) to use BOTH spkg-check and doctests
>>
>> But what should I choose in this situation?
>
> Many packages are checked by both spkg-check and doctests. If you take a
> package like R for instance, the spkg-check will run R's testsuite, whereas
> the doctests will only confirm that R can be called from Sage - there is
> very little actual testing done of R.

And then there are other packages like pari where the sage doctests do
way more testing than any existing upstream tests.

- Robert

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