Dear Wiki user,

You have subscribed to a wiki page or wiki category on "Stdcxx Wiki" for change 
notification.

The following page has been changed by MartinSebor:
http://wiki.apache.org/stdcxx/ExpectedFailures

The comment on the change is:
Added a brief description of the project.

New page:
The goal of the Expected Failures project is to deal with the unavoidable 
reality that stdcxx has failures in its test suites that cannot easily be fixed 
or worked around, either due to hard problems in the project itself or in some 
third party dependency such as a compiler or an operating system. The solution 
is to indicate these kinds of "expected" failures in test results in a way that 
makes it possible to distinguish them from all the others (i.e., the unexpected 
kind).

To that end we categorize the kinds of failures that we encounter and assign 
each a code and color in the test result pages. Since the same test can fail 
with different symptoms on different platforms or even different versions of 
the same platform, it seems best to decouple this information from the test 
itself and store it
separately. The process then goes like this. As each failure is analyzed it 
either gets fixed or it becomes expected. The nature of each expected failure 
(compilation error, signal name, non-zero exit status, etc.) is entered in a 
special file along with the platforms it's observed on and with the bug key. 
Each time an new entry to
the file is added the bug key is also mentioned in the Subversion change 
comment so that the entry is cross-referenced in the issue in Jira. This 
special file is then referenced when we generate our test results so that the 
expected failures can be distinguished from any others on our web site.

You can see how this works in practice on one of our result pages, for instance:
http://stdcxx.apache.org/builds/4.2.x/aix-5.3-ppc-vacpp-9.0.html

The kinds (categories) of failures we distinguish are described in 
[http://stdcxx.apache.org/builds/4.2.x/aix-5.3-ppc-vacpp-9.0.html#codes Codes] 
section on the same page.

The special file where we enter expected failures is called `xfail.txt`. See, 
for example, the 
[http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/stdcxx/branches/4.2.x/etc/config/xfail.txt 
xfail.txt] file on the 4.2.x branch.

An example of a change that added an expected failure for the problem described 
in [http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/STDCXX-1009 STDCXX-1009] is 
[http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=rev&revision=693416 r693416]

What's not supported in this scheme yet is the ability to denote just a subset 
of a test's assertions as expected to fail. The solution to the problem that we 
discussed but haven't had time to implement yet is to assign each assertion a 
sequential number and use it to denote those that are expected fail for known
reasons using a comma separated list. 

Reply via email to