Running tests on windows

Angel Ezquerra Moreu angel.ezquerra at gmail.com
Wed Mar 21 10:09:35 CDT 2012


On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 3:37 PM, Mads Kiilerich <mads at kiilerich.com> wrote:
> On 03/21/2012 08:51 AM, Angel Ezquerra Moreu wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm looking into running the test suite on windows. I got two
>> different sets of instructions from:
>>
>> 1.- http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/WindowsTestingPlan
>>
>> and
>>
>> 2.- http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/HackableMercurial
>>
>> The pysh repository metioned on #1 has gotten no commits in 13 months.
>> Am I correct in assuming that the current way to run the tests on
>> windows is to do as suggested in #2? If so, should I change #1 to
>> point to #2?
>
>
> It is different and unrelated approaches, and WindowsTestingPlan predates
> HackableMercurial.
>
> I documented how to run tests with MSYS in a "hackable" environment and
> added the necessary test suite support, workarounds, bug fixes and
> blacklists to get a clean run of the test suite (with half the tests skipped
> for various reasons).
>
> Unfortunately it seems like nobody uses it, and I assume it now suffers from
> bit rot.
>
> That proves to me that the lack of test suite wasn't the reason windows
> users don't contribute much. It seems like windows users simply don't care
> if Mercurial is stable on their platform and they don't want to contribute.
>
> I hope this trolling will provoke someone to prove me wrong ;-)

:-)

I think the problem may be that windows users are more "GUI oriented".
Perhaps they are simply more likely to contribute to TortoiseHg and
similar GUI tools for example. I know that was originally my case. I
look around me and I see that most windows users I know are not heavy
command line users. There are exceptions of course but it seems to be
a common trend.

I think that hackable mercurial was a very big step forward to make it
easier for us windows users to start to contribute. The fact that the
test suite cannot be run as-is is yet another obstacle that I wish was
not there. Even though thanks to your efforts it is now possible to
run part of the test suite on windows, it is not quite as easy as
running it on Linux yet.

In my opinion there are two things that could make it easier for
windows users to contribute to mercurial:

1. Let the test suite run on cygwin, with as little workarounds and
custom setup steps as possible.
2. Make it possible to run TortoiseHg from sources on top of hackable mercurial.

I think #2 would be quite important. It would give a natural path for
the windows TortoiseHg contributors to contribute to mercurial itself.

Angel


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