The core regression test suite is getting ever more comprehensive. This is seen as good. Consequentially it's getting larger. Getting larger is making it take longer to run. This isn't so good.
apt-get has this nice feature where it can download packages from several sites in parallel, to exploit the fact that the download bottleneck for a single site may be beyond where the routes diverge. Multi-CPU machines are becoming more common. I was wondering - would it be feasible to give the harness script the *option* of running sets of tests in parallel. I'm assuming that this would be useful for things like t/op/*.t and t/uni/*.t, and maybe lib/.../*.t I can see 3 initial questions 1: how does screen layout work when you're running more than one test? 2: how does the caller of test specify how many tests to run in parallel? 3: how do setup/teardown tests identify themselves? Is this feasible? If we can get parallel makes working reliably (now in perltodo: http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse?patch=25431 ) then I suspect that the time for "make test" will become the biggest bottleneck. Also, I've re-ordered perltodo to put the easiest tasks first: http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse?file=pod%2Fperltodo.pod&rev= I'm hoping that more people might read it (and find something interesting to challenge themselves with) now that it no longer starts with scary brain- melting things like re-writing the regexp engine and copy on write for ithreads. Nicholas Clark
