Running tests on windows

[Mads Kiilerich]

On 03/21/2012 04:09 PM, Angel Ezquerra Moreu wrote:
> 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.

Really?

The test suite _do_ run as-is when you have MSYS. But granted, it 
requires a posix environment with sh and other tools, something that 
"all" unix systems have preinstalled.

Many Unix users have had problems running from source (and thus running 
the test suite) because they didn't have a Python development setup and 
thus couldn't build Mercurial from scratch.

I don't see much of a difference.

The necessary MSYS packages are easy to install, but they could probably 
all be bundled in a 'Hackable2' zip. Hint hint ;-)

> 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.

Why is cygwin better? Is it just because you happen to like it and 
already have it installed?

Cygwin is however a different environment that neither is windows nor 
posix. It might be usable for some purposes, but a test run under cygwin 
doesn't prove anything regarding running under "pure" windows.

> 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.

I am sure that already is possible. The main issue will be to decide if 
you want to use the Python bundled with 'hackable' or some other Python 
that is installed on the system.

What might be missing is a 'Hackable TortoiseHg' that also includes all 
the python modules TortoiseHg requires and the tortoisehg source.

/Mads