Re: [boost] Getting Started Testing with Linux virtual machine on Windows host

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Vladimir Prus wrote:

On 17.12.2013 17:58, Beman Dawes wrote:

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On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 1:59 PM, James Sharpe wrote:

Why not create a vagrant config for this: http://www.vagrantup.com?

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Very interesting! I had never heard of Vagrant.

Dave Abrahams has voiced the opinion that a test-on-demand setup moving Boost closer to a continuous integration environment would be a lot easier to implement if the testers were running in uniformly configured virtual machines.

What 'uniformly configured' means exactly? I don't think that could mean that all Linux testers use VM with Ubuntu 13.10 32-bit, since that would not detect any RHEL5 64-bit bugs?

- Volodya

I agree, we've never had very uniform configuration before, but that meant we've had a lot of diversity in our tests. Though this makes setting up a tester more difficult, it gives us a lot of unique coverage. I'd consider this a huge plus, with the correlating downside being that it can be very difficult to get a test runner setup. Another way to think about our great diversity, look at the platforms: AIX, FreeBSD (also Mac), Linux, Windows. Then multiply them by all the different compiler+library configurations: gcc-4.[4-8], gcc* with cpp[98,11,1y], clang-3.[0-4], clang* with libstd++, intel-[11,12,13], msvc-[8-12], msvc with stlport, borland?, gcc* mingw, and more! We would literally need hundreds of setups to get all those combinations. Plus, I think several of the people who run tests don't have them running in a VM, they just kick them off from the command line. (Although all my teeks99-* tests are run with the exact same VM image...one for linux one for windows.) Speaking of windows, I get the impression from reading the vagrant site that they don't work well with windows. The only reference I found to vagrant with windows was this github repo: https://github.com/WinRb/vagrant-windows which indicated that you would need to have a base windows VM image. In this case, licensing would obviously preclude it from being distributed amongst testers. One idea for the windows side, is to ask if Microsoft would be interested in donating some Azure virtual machines to dedicate to boost visual studio testing. We could get one machine image setup for each of the five supported compilers and then use a vagrant-like system to work with a CI scheduler to test those compilers. Tom