On 2/12/2004 9:07 PM, Randy W. Sims wrote:
How about a model that allows people to volunteer when they can (vs always). Say you have a server. You would be an author-client. You'd say I have this software that needs to be tested. The server would take it and mark it available for testing. Then test-clients could log-on (or more probably set a cron job or login script). The server would say to clients that login, "Ok, I have these jobs that need testing."
The problem is turn around time. In order for this to be useful, I need
to be able to make a change to the code and within the span of five or ten minutes get results back from the system. The distributed testing would
be used pretty much like 'make test'.
The idea (which, admittedly is far from ideal) is to have enough volunteers that a machine would always be available. Systems would be coming on and going off, but *hopefully* there will always a system online for testing.
The other problem is I don't see that "always volunteering" is inconvenient. You run a client program that connects to the test server and idles in the background until contacted by the server with work. Then it does an automated build/test with no intervention from the user. No human required.
The "problem" that I was trying to overcome with my suggestion is that, for examle, I have several computers at my house running Debian GNU/Linux and Windows 2000 (and soon will have one running OpenBSD), but I don't keep those systems up all the time - they generate too much heat. I could make them available part-time, so that when they're available they could poll a server to see if anything needs to be tested. If it does it downloads, runs the tests, and sends off a test report - which is what CPAN++ was made for.
Actually, why not just setup your own CPAN. Testers can point CPAN++ at your CPAN server and it's mostly done. You just need a script to drive CPAN++ for testers to use to make things easier for them. Easy, simple, and effective if you can get people testing.
Turn around time too slow and requires a human.
The polling, downloading, testing, reporting would all be scripted. No human intervention.
It may not be the best solution (although, I don't see a down side), but it would likely be the easiest to implement, and I think it completely side-steps any security issues.
Randy.
