Re: FWD: delegation for the summer of code admins
On Wed, Feb 02, 2011 at 02:51:15PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> A second idea would be to push the package test issue currently
> discussed on debian-devel foreward. I specifically consider this a
> science issue because I could perfectly imagine a process where we
> could feed test data into a just compiled programm and compare the
> result with some expectations.
While I was quite a bit dubious about this in Travemünde, I (re-)read
parts of the -devel thread now and changed my mind.
Having a way to install a scientific blend and then fire off a "verify
everything (important) actually produces correct results" on the
installed packages seems to be an important thing we could offer the
scientific developer/user community.
Possibly have "minimal test"/"full test" options, so the cluster admin
can either check things work in general (e.g. on every newly installed
node), or run a full check once before replicating the cluster nodes.
We might even want to think about tying this into a more elaborate
re-building architecture. E.g. retrieving all available Fortran/C/C++
compilers and basic computional science library packages via debtags and
letting the user/cluster admin decide which they want, install those,
then recompile their applications against those and finally verify they
work through autopkgtest.
For the case of scientific packages, it is important to
semi-intelligently parse the output and catch unimportant
rounding-differences in the nth decimal place without declaring
everything broken. I guess there are a couple of dead sourceforge
projects for this.
> A third issue which comes to mind is the request to use *defined*
> versions of programms and not just a version which is by chance packaged
> in any Debian release, for instance by using packages from
> snapshots.debian.org.
Can you elaborate on this? I am not sure what you mean here. It
doesn't sound like it would take somebody 3+ months of full-time work to
do this in any case, though.
Michael
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