Testing

[Hal Murray]

(Context is that I went to edit a config file to test something and I ran into 
some cruft leftover from testing something else.)

Handwave...

There are a zillion corner cases that I'd like to be able to test.  A typical 
example is something like: with configuration X, Y should happen.  You can 
check that by looking in the log file or using ntpq.

With something like a compiler that shouldn't be timing dependent, it's 
straightforward to setup a system for feeding a small chunk of code to the 
compiler and comparing the output to a known good pattern.  Once you have 
that, then you can collect all the small chunks used to diagnose bugs and add 
a wrapper to run the whole collection.

But NTP is all about timing.

Eric: What is the name/term for your attempt at capturing and replaying 
things?  Is there a good writeup of why it didn't work?

Anybody know anything about finding things in log files?  I think I could 
setup a fuzzy pattern to search for.  I can think of 3 results: pass, fail, 
and timeout.

Matching ntpq output gets more complicated.  I think we would need a way to 
identify slots and constrain the value.

If I had something like that working in my environment, how would we run as 
much as possible on your environment?  Maybe variables in the config file for 
server names?  So I could use my local servers and you could use yours.

Does any of that make sense?


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.