platforms problems

[Andy Dougherty]

On Thu, 2 Aug 2012, Andrew Whitworth wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 6:56 AM, Jimmy Zhuo <jimmy.zhuo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I'd like to mark the failed tests to skip on those platforms temporally
> > since there is no developer resources to
> > work on those platforms.
> 
> That's probably my preferred solution, for now. A failing test only
> matters if we can fix it, which we really don't have the developer
> resources to do right now. At least this way we can keep a record of
> what the problems are on which systems and hope we find somebody able
> to fix them later.

Sometimes portability issues point out weaknesses in a platform.  Other 
times, they expose weaknesses in parrot.  One of the biggest challenges is 
identify which one you're dealing with.

For the threads tests, it sure seems like a race condition to me that is 
exposing a weakness in parrot's thread implementation.  Last time I 
looked, the tests were relying on sleep() calls.  That seems wrong and 
fragile to me.  No explicit sleep call should be needed.  The threading 
interface ought to supply the necessary functions to ensure things are in 
whatever state the tests are expecting.

For the threads examples, I have no idea what they are actually supposed 
to do -- there's no documentation -- so I was never sure what was supposed 
to be happening with them, and couldn't usefully test them either.

-- 
    Andy Dougherty		doughera at lafayette.edu