[Python-Dev] Trimming "make quicktest"

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mar 23, 2011, at 02:52 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

>Then many people will start running the "smoke test" rather than the
>whole suite, which will create new kinds of problems. It's IMO a bad
>idea. Let Barry learn about "-j" :)

Well, that's a social problem, not a technical problem.

(See other messages in the thread regarding -j.)

>> Currently even "make quicktest" takes too long to run to be suitable
>> for that task. Leaving out a couple more egregiously slow tests and
>> possibly updating it to use the "-j" switch might make for a usable
>> option.
>
>"-j" will precisely help cover the duration of these long tests. By the
>way, you should use a higher "-j" number than you have CPUs, since some
>tests spend most of their time sleeping and waiting.
>
>"make quicktest" already skips test_io and test_socket, which test
>fundamental parts of Python. I would vote for removing "make quicktest"
>rather than promote such a questionable command.

Better to rename it than remove it.  If 'quicktest' is misleading people into
running it rather than 'test' (which frankly, I doubt), then rename it
'smoketest' which seems entirely appropriate to its use case and indicates its
value in the spectrum of tests:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoketest

Because this also rebuilds Python if needed, I think it's entirely appropriate
for the push-race use case, where you've already extensively tested your
change with a mostly up-to-date tree and now just need to quickly verify that
Python won't crash and burn after your local merge.

-Barry
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