[petsc-dev] Nightly tests quick summary page

[Karl Rupp]

Hi,

>     Any thoughts/experiences? I know Jed has good plans on a testing
>     environment, so this is not meant to be an assault on him ;-)
>
>
> I am always skeptical of big programs to overall a large piece of
> infrastructure that works fairly well.

Yes, the overall complexity should be easily manageable in order to keep 
the focus on the actual work.


> However, there is a really simple thing that we need which would make us
> much much much better
> at using our own tests. We need a better way to test numerical output. I
> am not sure what the right
> thing to do is, or I would have already done it.
>
> The current best solution is to print fewer digits, which judging from
> the HTML page is not sufficient.
> I think that current PETSc output is so stylized that parsing output is
> feasible, and would allow nice
> diffs with tolerances tailored to the type of output and individual test.

I'm afraid I don't know enough about the tests currently performed. 
Maybe the tests are on average just trying to test too large a block of 
functionality at the same time? Almost all the errors reported on the 
HTML page are actually build-errors, so currently there's more emphasis 
on the code quality.

Best regards,
Karli