On Sun, 1 Dec 2002, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote: [...]
This is too complicated. First, it requires Visual C++, which sucks.
I think that being able to compile the tests with Visual C++ is very important. There are a lot of professional Windows programmers out there who have Visual C++ and who would be very qualified for writing tests and who may not want to install MinGW on their Windows machine. So it's important to make it as easy as possible for them to write tests in the environment they are most confortable with, i.e. Visual C++.
We should be able to compile the tests with MinGW, as any OSS project out there. So I would say the TODO for building the tests is as follows:
- make sure we can compile them with MinGW
That said I agree that the tests should also be compilable with MinGW because OSS projects should strive to be self-sufficient.
- arrange such that we can generate _one_ executable for all tests
I think this is not necessary. All we need is a batch file to invoke all the tests and Patrik has already supplied that part.
- create script that builds them say, every few (3-5) days, tests if the executable changed (by comparing MD5 sums) from the last build, and if so, put it up for download on a site, and email the test volunteers a notification (containing the URL) that the tests have changed, and they should retest. The URL should be fixed (e.g. http://www.corp.com/wine/wine-tests.exe), so the tester can bookmark it, write scripts against it, etc.
All that's needed now is the packaging of the batch file plus the test executables. Then we may start on the automation aspects but it may not be very easy unless we can cross-compile the tests, i.e. generate Windows executables from Linux (which I believe should be possible).