[Zope-dev] HEADS UP: QA Problems with Zope 2

[Christian Theune]

Hi,

as I'm the guy who clicks the "build" button for the Zope 2 Windows
releases I have the unfortunate honor to write his complaining mail:

Situation
=========

a) Zope 2.8 as of release a2 does not run bin/test.py anymore. Neither
on Linux nor on Windows. Unfortunately this is the only testrunner
worked on Windows at all. Now it is broken as well. (Import problems
from Five.products or something)

b) The WinBuilder environment isn't version managed along the Zope
branches. The change of the Zope module to Zope2 required manual changes
in the WinBuilder structure that broke and didn't got detected during
continous tests. (See c) Additionally the requirements of specific
versions Python, ZODB, winutils etc. are hardcoded in the Makefiles
right now.

c) There are no nightly tests for Windows at all. I know there is some
suspended effort already around. Please notice this as a friendly
reminder that I'd be very lucky having those catch errors *before*
Andreas makes a release and I run the tests manually.

d) zopectl on windows doesn't work (it barfs about SIG_CHILD not
existing). I'm not sure if it ever did or if it should. If it should not
work on windows anyway, maybe we should remove it in the windows
distribution ...

All in all, it's a very unsatisfying situation for the Windows users,
and I'm pretty scared telling anybody about the situation when I'm
asked. This really has to change at least a bit.

What to do
==========

Things I can do and propose to do to make this better:
------------------------------------------------------

b): I can either create branches for WinBuilders responding to the Zope
    Versions. Or (what I like better) I can put the WinBuilders
    somewhere in the Zope 2 tree to allow versioning along a branch
    automatically so continuous tests know where to get the WinBuilders
    from.

c): If there is some infrastructure with the build bot around already
    and someone gives me pointers, I can set up nightly builds and
    tests on a Win2k machine over here. Additionally the tests should
    run on XP Server (or professional) and Win 2003 server as well. I
    don't have those around unfortunately + I don't have enough Visual
    Studio licenses around. Anyway, having at least one continuously
    running test is better than having none.

Things I can't do anything right now on my own and need support:
----------------------------------------------------------------

a) I'm not able to look into the test runners (that are not broken
   solely on windows) nor to look into Five integration problems. I'd
   love if someone could a) either fix test.py or b) deprecate it and
   give me the hint to some other runner that works. 

   test.py is included and should therefore work within a release or be
   removed. I'm not sure what is right here.

d) I have no idea about zopectl on windows. Is there some knowledge
   around on this?

================
Final conclusion
================

I have a compiled Zope 2.8a2 around here, but I'm not able to run the
unit tests on it and I'm not willing to publish it therefore because I
have the suspicion that this branch never has seen windows before except
the one pass of unit tests before 2.8a1.

Cheers,
Christian

-- 
gocept gmbh & co. kg - schalaunische str. 6 - 06366 koethen - germany
www.gocept.com - ct at gocept.com - phone +49 3496 30 99 112 -
fax +49 3496 30 99 118 - zope and plone consulting and development
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