How do I diagnose test errors?

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Wed Jun 4 17:20:24 CDT 2008


I'm running on Windows, with Patrick's windows test suite patches. I'm
getting a number of test suite errors, but I'm not sure how to
interpret the results. The summary at the end of the test run says
that 8 new failures have appeared (compared to before I applied my
patches). I need to check if they are ignorable (just the result of
cosmetic output changes like pathnames using \ instead of /) or
serious.

For example, test-rename failed. I have files test-rename,
test-rename.err and test-rename.out. Am I right to assume that
test-rename.out is the expected output, and test-rename.err is what my
run produced? (And hence that diff between these 2 files shows me
what's changed as a result of my patch)?

Also, as I'm not entirely familiar with what the precise output from
hg should be, is there an easy way to tell which output in the .out
file corresponds to which commands in the test (short of following
through line by line)? For example, one of the failures appears to
have lines "adding <filename>" which are new. I'm not sure why - I'm
not clear on the precise rules as to when hg add reports which files
are added, so I can't tell what this extra output indicates. (But as
it's "only" user feedback, I'm not sure how important it is - can
cosmetic issues like this be addressed simply by patching the test
output to match the new expected output? My instincts say no, as it's
a change, but frankly, I'd rather concentrate on functionality than on
what seem to be minor user interface changes).

Does anyone have any advice?

Thanks,
Paul.


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